New options for Sacramento vegans are expected to open very soon. Beast + Bounty and Milk Money are the new projects for Michael Hargis, owner of the Lowbrau and Block Butcher Bar, and it will offer a wide vegan menu and vegan ice cream and doughnuts. The two places will be right next door to each other in midtown’s Ice Blocks development.
Beast + Bounty executive chef, Brock Macdonald, created a wide menu that includes plenty vegan dishes, especially adapted to fit dietary limitations. The dishes won’t contain any white sugar, since it’s usually overprocessed and bleached with bone char, and will substitute leftover chickpea liquid called aquafaba, using this instead of eggs. The restaurant will serve apricot salad and pizzas with ash-covered fermented cashew, almond and pine nut cheese.
According to a study run by GlobalData on 2017, six times as many Americans identified as vegan since the last study in 2014, and that percentage often increases in major cities.
That’s why, alongside Beast + Bount’s menu, LowBrau is also dedicated to expand to more vegan options and it’s one of 32 Sacramento restaurants that compete in the month-long Great Vegan Burger Battle.
“Instead of something along the lines of ‘just take the bacon off that or the chicken off that,’ we, from the very beginning, are designing dishes that are truly vegan,” Macdonald said. “There are a lot of people that are becoming vegan or vegetarian now, so we want to have a good amount of options for them.”
Meanwhile, Pastry chef Edward Martinez is in charge of creating all the doughnut flavors and will supervise production of six kinds of ice cream. The stand out is the “Waka Flocka Flame”, a vanilla vegan brioche with a strawberry-almond milk glaze, that has already been tested out successfully at pop-ups.
“Instead of (Sacramento) always looking at the bigger metropolitan cities and going ‘oh, I want to be like that,’ I wanted the bigger cities to look at us and be like ‘Oh, I want to be like that or I wish we had that,'” Hargis said to the Sacramento Bee.
Beast + Bounty will open at 8 a.m. all week and close at 10 p.m. on weekdays and 2 a.m. on weekends. Milk Money will open from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., and it’s going to include a to-go window in order to serve late-night treats.
