How Slutty Vegan Puts the Party in Plant-Based Food

“Better than McDonald’s,” he said.

“Better than American McDonald’s,” the second guy countered, adding that European McDonald’s and Slutty Vegan might be neck and neck.

The third guy was still contemplating his Ménage à Trois. He’d never eaten a vegan burger of any kind. “You know how in video games you start with a generic character with no experience and no upgrades?” he said. “That’s what this is for me.”

“I got my entrepreneurial hustle from my dad, the most brilliant man I’ve ever known,” Cole told me one Thursday in February, as we sat eating hot “chicken” sandwiches and drinking mojitos at Bar Vegan, a small-plates Slutty Vegan spinoff in Atlanta’s Ponce City Market, a converted Sears building that’s now home to dozens of high-end venders. The day Cole was born, her father, Stanley, a Jamaican immigrant, was sentenced to thirty years in prison for his role as the leader of what prosecutors described as a “large-scale cocaine distribution ring,” whose proceeds he laundered through fronts including a Baltimore night club called Exodus. “He did what he had to do to provide for his family,” Cole said. After his imprisonment, she and her four siblings were raised by her mother, Ichelle, also from Jamaica, who worked in a bank and as a McDonald’s cashier to support the family on her own. She also sang in Strykers Posse, an all-female reggae cover band, and wore dreadlocks that hung to the ground. “People always wanted her picture—I wanted to be like that when I grew up,” Cole said.

Before she was old enough to drive, Cole was running logistics for a Baltimore party-promoting crew. To secure leases on venues, she’d dress in pants suits and act the part of an older woman. Charles Smith, who helped start the crew and now makes music under the name DJ Blaqstarr, told me, of the routine, “It was like some Tyler Perry stuff.” They handed out flyers at schools and malls and were soon drawing a thousand kids to parties in downtown warehouses at ten bucks a head. Smith recalled that the fire marshal showed up repeatedly, and that at one party the organizers were robbed at gunpoint, but that Cole had a dogged show-must-go-on attitude. In her junior year, she got kicked out of school after a dispute with another girl over the title of prom queen—“I was the aggressor,” she told me—but persuaded the superintendent to let her transfer to the city’s best all-girls public school. From there, she matriculated at a historically black university, Clark Atlanta (“basically because I saw Ludacris there on MTV,” she said), where she joined an élite sorority and became the campus beauty-pageant queen. Crystal Kelly, a classmate and a close friend, told me, “I’d never known someone with so much belief in herself.”

Cole graduated in 2009, with a degree in communications, and, after a false start with Teach for America, moved to Los Angeles to try to make it as an actress. “I had two hundred and fifty dollars, a suitcase, and a Bible,” Cole said. (“I don’t read the Bible,” she added. “It was just for, like, symbolic protection.”) She took acting classes and spent a few months as an extra on “Glee,” but the gig paid poorly, and a former sorority sister encouraged her to take a job in production. Cole spent the next few years working on tabloidy talk shows, including Maury Povitch’s, which, she said, “showed me that Black people ain’t the only people that got problems.” By the age of twenty-four, she was making six figures. But the work didn’t satisfy her enterprising side. In 2014, a Jamaican friend in Harlem, who ran a restaurant, mentioned that a storefront around the corner was for rent. Cole had no background in food service, but she had money saved and her boyfriend at the time was handy enough to help build the space out. She told me, “It just made sense.”

When Cole was growing up, Ichelle followed a vegetarian Ital diet, according to Rastafarian tradition: stews of red beans and okra in coconut milk; brown rice with steamed rhubarb, collards, or callaloo. But Ichelle’s mother, who lived with them, made dishes like oxtail, pressure-cooked until the meat was sticky and tender. Cole’s restaurant, Pinky’s Jamaican and American, served that dish and other Caribbean staples—beef patties, ackees, steaming crab legs. Cole hadn’t yet arrived at the flamboyant style that would define Slutty Vegan, but she painted the restaurant’s exterior the color of bubble gum, and the Pinky’s Web site boasted, “The best damn jerk in Harlem!” She told me, “I didn’t have a publicist, and I didn’t get reviewed, but I still had lines.” A year later, she opened a juice bar, also called Pinky’s.

Since college, Cole had experimented with eliminating meat from her diet, and now she went fully plant-based. She looked at veganism as a personal test. “I’m the one who wants to get to my highest level of achievement,” she told me, adding that even now she sometimes takes a “raw vegan challenge,” a trend of temporarily forgoing cooked food, which she tapped into on YouTube. “I’m a master faster,” she said. “I’m always elevating.”

In the summer of 2016, a grease fire destroyed the Pinky’s restaurant. Cole had no fire insurance, and she’d put most of her savings into the business. Her car was repossessed, and she was evicted from her apartment. She started a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for a reopening, but soon gave up the idea. Around the same time, her boyfriend was arrested for killing someone in a fight. (He was convicted of manslaughter and remains incarcerated.) “It was the low point of my life,” Cole told me.

She returned to L.A. and to TV work, as a supervising producer on “Iyanla: Fix My Life,” a talk show on the Oprah Winfrey Network hosted by the inspirational speaker Iyanla Vanzant. “It was almost like going to therapy, and I didn’t have to pay for it,” Cole said. She started running five miles a day and reading self-help books with titles such as “Think and Grow Rich.” Kelly, her college friend, told me that Cole often bounced around new business ideas, not all of them sterling. (“I recall a weave-cleaning concept,” she said, laughing.) But Cole’s embrace of veganism provided new fodder. Her older brother Jaware, an early employee of Slutty Vegan, recalls her bemoaning the lack of vegan food options late at night, “after leaving the club.” In 2018, Cole went back to Atlanta to take a short-term role on a TV show. One evening, lying in bed in a rental apartment downtown, she became lost in thought. “Honestly, I’d hit the blunt,” she told me. “And I’m not even a smoker! But I was high. It was a good high.” She called Kelly to float the name for a new restaurant concept. They considered a few—including Vixen Vegan—but Kelly approved of Cole’s first choice. “I was, like, Slutty Vegan, hands down—that’s the one,” Kelly recalled. “Sex sells.”

One recent weekday afternoon, Cole was at the Whittley Agency, a Black-owned business-management and consulting firm in Atlanta, sitting at a long conference table beneath a “Black Panther” movie poster. She wore a skin-tight black dress and Chanel sneakers and had her hair (maintained, she said, with the help of a “hair-style architect”) in a cascading topknot. She held up her phone to inspect Slutty Vegan’s Instagram account, which has the advantage of being the app’s first result for “slutty.” The account has five hundred and eighty-four thousand followers. “We’ll have a million by the end of the year,” she told me.

A young Black man walked into the room, wearing tortoiseshell sunglasses and an Atlanta Hawks ball cap. He was a representative from Lululemon, the athleisure brand. Cole had called the meeting to discuss a potential partnership. After some introductions, she launched into a pitch.

“Slutty Vegan is not just a restaurant,” she said, and mentioned a recent team-up with the footwear designer Steve Madden to create a limited-edition vegan-leather sneaker. “Sold out in forty-eight hours,” she said, leaning toward the rep. “We did a partnership with Shake Shack: sold out in an hour. People look at us as a life-style brand.”

Dora Whittley, the founder of the consulting agency, sat beside Cole, wearing dangly earrings and a black turtleneck with puffed shoulders. The group discussed the idea of Slutty Vegan and Lululemon working together on body-positivity campaigns, on philanthropic initiatives, and on a documentary series about bootstrap entrepreneurs which Cole, on the spot, dubbed “Lulu Lemonade.”

“We call her ‘Pinky Is the Brain,’ ” Whittley said. “Because literally anything you give to her, her mind goes to creative ideation. It’s almost automated.”

There was a TV at one end of the room, and Whittley pressed Play on a sizzle reel for a new project that Cole was developing, tentatively called “American Sesh,” in which celebrities, entrepreneurs, and “creatives” are given “thirty seconds to come up with a company that can scale to a billion-dollar business.” Cole mentioned that she’d arranged a meeting about it with Mark Burnett, the producer of “Survivor” and “The Apprentice.” (“Pinky clearly has her finger firmly on the pulse of what’s next in business,” Burnett told me.)

“Here are all of my dependents.”

Cartoon by Elisabeth McNair

“Do y’all do, like, what Stephen Curry is to Under Armour?” she asked the rep.

“We call those global ambassadors,” he said.

“Let’s include me on that potential list, then,” Cole said.

“One hundred per cent,” the rep said. “You’d fit as a city ambassador, and then elevate into a global ambassador eventually.”

“I’m already global—the world just don’t see me yet,” Cole said, adding, “I am going to be bigger than Oprah.” Both Whittley and the rep nodded solemnly.

When the meeting ended, Cole and Whittley dialled in two managers and two publicists for an “all things Pinky Cole” briefing. They discussed an Essence cover shoot, a branded CBD “slutty gummy,” and ways to drum up more good press for Bar Vegan. (The month before, a former Bar Vegan employee had filed a wage-theft lawsuit against Cole and her business partners; Cole responded that she was not involved in the restaurant’s day-to-day operations, adding, “I was not familiar with this ordeal.”) Cole had pitched a collaboration with Ben & Jerry’s on a Slutty Vegan-themed flavor called One Night Stand—like the company’s burger of the same name, it would feature faux bacon—and had booked an appearance on “Good Morning America” to discuss her cookbook, “Eat Plants, B*tch,” which includes sections such as “Da Butter, Da Dips, Da Jams, and Da Jellies.” The grand opening of a Slutty Vegan outpost in Harlem was also approaching, and Cole wanted it to be a surprise to the public. “Similar to the Beyoncé album she suddenly dropped: the whole Internet in a frenzy,” she said, adding, “Hopefully, I can get Al Sharpton to stand beside me. Jesse Jackson DM’d me the other day.” (In the end, the opening, in March, was a more subdued affair—the weather was lousy, Sharpton was nowhere to be found—but Cole described returning to Harlem, just down the street from the former Pinky’s spot, as a “full-circle moment.”)

How Slutty Vegan Puts the Party in Plant-Based Food
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