On this day in vegan history · July 27, 2016
The Impossible Burger Reaches a Restaurant Table
A plant burger engineered to bleed reached its first restaurant table, at David Chang's Momofuku Nishi in Manhattan.
The facts
- Debut
- July 27, 2016, Momofuku Nishi, New York City
- Product
- Impossible Burger, a plant-based ground-beef analogue
- The trick
- Soy leghemoglobin, a heme molecule made by fermentation, for meaty color and taste
On July 27, 2016, Impossible Foods put its burger on a public menu for the first time, at Momofuku Nishi, the New York restaurant owned by chef David Chang. The pitch was unusual for a veggie burger. It was designed to look, cook, and taste like ground beef, down to the way it browns and appears to bleed, thanks to leghemoglobin, a heme molecule the company brews rather than farms. The target customer was not the committed vegetarian but the person who orders a burger and does not want to trade down. Putting it in Chang's kitchen, rather than a health-food cafe, was the whole point.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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The restaurant Momofuku Nishi in New York, owned by David Chang, began serving the Impossible Burger in July 2016.
Wikipedia, entry on Impossible Foods
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
The Nishi debut launched the plant-based burger into the mainstream restaurant world and helped kick off the meat-analogue boom of the late 2010s. Within two years the Impossible Burger was in thousands of locations.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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