GustOrganics, a health food restaurant on 6th Avenue, was just trying to do some good when it decided to go almost entirely vegan back in November. Unfortunately, its customer base turned out to be mostly paleo-eating "CrossFit people," as owner Kiki Adami puts it, who were completely enraged to find the menu suddenly populated with homemade lemon seitan and kale pizza with a chickpea crust.
As Adami tells DNAinfo, the restaurant has been getting "hate mail" from meat lovers ever since the menu change, despite the fact that there are still three holdover meat dishes on the menu (turkey meatballs, rotisserie chicken, and filet mignon). Adami herself has gotten texts like, "Is something wrong with you?" from former customers. Worse, when it comes down to it, is the fact that the restaurant is no longer making any money. It's "been in the red" since November, Adami tells DNAinfo, and she and her husband (who's the chef) have had to cut their salaries in half.
But they're not going back on their decision to go vegan, which they made after watching some documentaries about the meat industry. Paleo dieters be damned, they plan to be entirely vegan in the next three to six months. And there is at least one upside to the loss of the CrossFit contingent: "The people that come in here at night, they're not hostile, they're super gentle," Adami says.