A pioneer of vegan fare is closing its doors this week. Spiral Diner Dallas, the first in the metroplex to offer vegan comfort food, will serve its last heap of vegan nachos by Sunday, August 14.
“People are going to think we’re totally crazy,” said owner Amy McNutt about closing her Oak Cliff location. The Dallas location now “needs more love than we can afford to give it,” McNutt told The Dallas Morning News.
“The landlords weren’t willing to meet us where we needed to be,” McNutt says. The end of an era will leave a hole in the metroplex’s vegan market, even with several vegan restaurants occupying the same territory.
McNutt opened her first vegan restaurant in Fort Worth in 2002, she is returning to her roots with three restaurants opening in Tarrant County by next year.
Her love for animals prompted her to open the restaurant, but she has not adopted the trendy “plant-based” description for her creations. McNutt says she will forever proudly call her locations and her food “vegan.”
“We shout it from the mountaintops,” McNutt says. The original concept was to make comfort food vegan so as not to have to sacrifice people’s favorite meals, like breakfast and “junk” food.
Spiral favorites The Lumberjack, a breakfast plate with biscuits and gravy, tofu scramble, and two vegan “sausage” patties, and The Nacho Supremo, piled high with dairy-free cheese, black beans, quinoa, olives, guacamole, and more, have become staples for the diner and will continue to be available at the new location.
Two of the restaurants in McNutt’s imminent expansion are new concepts — an upscale vegan restaurant, Maiden: Fine Plants and Spirits, and a tiny dessert shop, Dreamboat Donuts and Scoops.
The quaint 400-square-foot dessert shop will feature various donuts made in an off-site production kitchen and vegan ice cream, which was featured at Spiral Diners over the years.
Next door to Dreamboat Donuts and Scoops will be a new upscale vegan dining experience called Maiden: Fine Plants and Spirits.
Featuring a six to eight-court menu with seasonal offerings, Maiden will feature “the stuff we’ve never been able to do at Spiral,” McNutt says. “Spiral is quick and comforting. This is the exact opposite, where we can slow everything down, plate stuff really beautifully.”
Maiden and Dreamboat Donuts and Scoops will open at 1200 Sixth Ave., Fort Worth, near the existing Spiral Diner in Fort Worth in early 2023.
Also, next year, Arlington will also get a taste of McNutt’s vegan specialties as a new Spiral Diner will open on E. Front Street in Arlington’s growing Urban Union development.