We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dalan Griffin a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Dalan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – walk us through the story?

When I first became vegan at age 15, I didn’t realize the risk that being completely plant-based would involve when it came to business. I immediately had to start self-educating myself on vegan cooking techniques and recipes, as 20 years ago the idea of a vegan diet hadn’t been normalized in the nutrition and food culture. Trial and error were huge in perfecting the textures, looks, and flavors of recreating proteins that vegan diets lacked, yet I still missed eating. Normal breakfast foods like eggs and bacon, became a thing of the past, but I didn’t want it to be that way. That’s why I started my business Rascal’s Vegan, to bring back the foods that most vegans miss eating, just in a totally plant-based form.

Dalan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I started out in the culinary world at age 15. After becoming fully vegan I realized quickly I would have to start learning how to cook for myself, as my family and most people didn’t even know what veganism was. I wanted to make plant-based food easy and approachable to all. So, I started serving tortas, a traditional Mexican style sandwich, out of my garage to friends and neighbors. Everyone loved what I was creating, some of them not even knowing that the sandwich didn’t contain meat. After seeing people enjoying my food, I knew I wanted to bring my cuisine to the world and help create a sustainable culinary world for the planet.

I decided to take my plancha to the streets, popping up on street corners all over, and cooking food specials until sell out. I would have people lined up around the corner for my food, I would even do pop-ups on street corners in Mexico, New York, or wherever I was at the time. My pop-up journey throughout the years has taken me far, and I eventually met some amazing chefs that allowed me to use their kitchen spaces to produce my creations, mentoring and showing me the specific processes of their restaurants and how they were ran.

Now you can find me every day at my own restaurant at 432 E. Haley Street in Santa Barbara, where we have been successfully operating for 2 years. I still love getting out in my community and volunteering to cook for non-profits, teaching cooking classes about plant-based nutrition for the youth and elderly, or shopping at the farmer’s market to support local produce vendors. The main mission of our brand is to bring Authentic Mexico-City themed Street Food w. a Twist. to the world.
Sustainable, yet trendy, affordable, and approachable, plant-based food for all.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

I think the most effective strategy when involving the culinary world is fresh ingredients. Your guests can tell the difference when only the freshest produce has been used, and we pride ourselves in creating everything from scratch in our restaurant. Serving quality ingredients may cost more, but in the end it’s what will keep your customers coming back. I constantly hear about the flavors of our food being amazing, and that’s because we make everything fresh. Our tortillas are made to order, where we are stone grinding our own masa in house and hand pressing the tortillas, before putting them on the plancha. While this process is more time consuming, the end product leaves our guests coming back again and again. We have officially converted to zero processed seed oils in our kitchen, and while avocado and olive oil may be more costly, the health of our guests and taste of our food mean more to us at the end of the day.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

We are lucky to have amazing clients that can relate with our brand and travel from all over to find us. It’s this type of brand loyalty that has been keeping Rascal’s alive. While the plant-based community in Santa Barbara is amazing to us, we are also so blessed to have a large vegan following from Los Angeles and the surrounding areas as well. Many vegans passing through on trips up north or down south will find us, and as the only fully vegan restaurant left in SB, we rely on these visits to keep us afloat.

We also recently expanded our company with Palma Plant-Based Catering, offering large full-scale catered events to Santa Barbara County. “We want to be able to bring plant-based food outside of our 4 walls as well, and as the only fully vegan catering service in Santa Barbara, we thought that Palma Catering was essential for our plant-based community. ” Dalan Griffin

“Our ability to re-create proteins to smell, taste, and resemble foods, our guests are familiar with, is important on large scale events. When hundreds of people are enjoying your food it’s important that the menu is approachable for all. We love to see guests coming up for seconds, or children enjoying our “chicken” tacos, most having no idea that the event has a completely plant-based menu.” Annie Garjian – Catering Sales and Event Planner for Palma Catering; 20 years of experience in Hospitality, F+B, Sales, Event Planning

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.rascalsvegan.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rascalsvegan/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rascalsvegan/
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/rascals-vegan-santa-barbara
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@rascalsvegan
  https://www.palmacatering.events/
  https://www.instagram.com/palma__catering/

Image Credits

Viviana Contreras