Deliveroo’s ‘Restaurant Of The Year’ Winner, Bristol-based Oowee Vegan has today launched its first site in London. With all restaurants closed to dine-in customers due to the ongoing Covid19 crisis, the restaurant has launched virtually through the Deliveroo app.
Last year, Oowee Vegan bagged the prestigious title of ‘Restaurant of the Year’ at Deliveroo’s first ever Restaurant Awards, beating out tens of thousands of restaurants and takeaways across the UK.
Following their huge success in Bristol, the plant-based diner planned to launch their first London site on Stoke Newington Road in Dalston this year. Despite the ongoing Covid19 crisis that prohibits customers from visiting restaurants, Oowee’s founders Charlie Watson and Verity Foss made the decision to go ahead with the launch, by opening their restaurant virtually.
Oowee Vegan’s ‘virtual launch’ is one of many innovative ways the UK’s hospitality industry is adapting to the ongoing pandemic. With the site closed to dine-in customers, the restaurant is making sales exclusively through Deliveroo orders, and the app’s ‘click and collect’ feature.
Oowee Vegan’s entirely plant-based menu offers a range of American diner-style vegan dishes such as beyond meat burgers, vegan fried ‘chicken’ and sriracha ‘shrimp’ loaded fries. Their dish ‘The Big Oovee’, made up of a beyond meat patty, oovee dirty sauce, american cheese, hash browns, gherkins and lettuce, was recently listed in the top five most popular Deliveroo orders in Bristol over the lockdown period.
The vegan restaurant started off as a ‘virtual brand’ of burger joint Oowee Diner in a Deliveroo Editions site, with the aim of recreating its menu but with entirely vegan ingredients. However, its success on Deliveroo meant that it soon earned its own bricks and mortar site providing vegan burgers to Bristolians. Oowee Diner has now decided to only open vegan sites moving forward.
In April last year, the restaurant made front page news, as a giveaway of free Oowee burgers organised to celebrate Deliveroo’s 5th birthday in Bristol city, turned into a ‘Burger Apocalypse’ drawing crowds of thousands of people awaiting one of the restaurant’s infamous burgers. ITV footage shows police called to College Green to calm the crowds of hungry Oowee fans*.
Verity Foss, Founder of Oowee Vegan said, “Our goals are to continue to invent and create food that is mouth-watering, delicious and is something everyone can enjoy – from meat-eaters to vegans. We focus on creating and developing new products that are for everyone, without focussing on cliches of what vegan food used to or ‘should’ be. Our mission is to bring people together with our culture and our food, and having had great success with this in Bristol, we can’t wait to spread this to London – and one day, the world!”
A spokesperson from Deliveroo said, “We’re incredibly proud to see how far Oowee Vegan has come over the space of a short few years. What originated as an experimental plant-based virtual brand in Bristol, has moved from success to success, and we have no doubt their launch in London will follow the same trajectory. It’s been quite the journey so far for our Restaurant of the Year 2019 winner, and we’re proud to be with them every step of the way!”
