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Only Two US Cities Made HappyCow's Latest World Top 25 for Vegan Food. Here Is What NYC and Portland Are Doing That Nobody Else Is.
The United States has the largest absolute vegan population in the world. Only two American cities crack HappyCow's global top 25 ranking. The reason reveals something structural about how American cities are built.
HappyCow is the largest crowd-sourced database of vegan and vegetarian restaurants in the world.
Its annual city ranking is the closest thing the global vegan food scene has to a league table, scoring cities on restaurant density within the central area, review quality, and year-over-year growth.
In the 2025 edition, only two US cities made the global top 25. New York City came in at number six.
ortland at number seventeen. In an earlier 2022 ranking, Los Angeles made the top ten and NYC placed third.
The directional story is clear. The US is losing ground on this specific metric even as its total vegan population grows.
That is not because American vegan restaurants are closing in large numbers.
It is because the metric HappyCow uses rewards something American cities are structurally bad at.
What HappyCow Is Actually Measuring
The ranking has three main inputs.
Restaurant density is the first and heaviest.
HappyCow counts fully vegan and vegetarian restaurants within a defined central radius, typically six to ten miles, and divides by the area and the population. Compact European and Asian cities, where restaurants cluster in walkable centers, score well.
Sprawling American metropolitan areas, where good vegan restaurants are often spread across a 40-mile county, score poorly.
Review quality and growth are the second and third inputs. Both are more forgiving to the US.
American vegan restaurants tend to have strong Yelp and Google review patterns, and the category has grown steadily year over year.
The problem is that these two factors are not enough to overcome the density gap.
London took the number one slot in 2022 with over 400 fully vegan businesses, and most were clustered inside the city center.
New York, with a comparable total count on paper, loses points because the restaurants are spread across five boroughs and much of the dining culture happens outside the HappyCow radius.
Why New York Still Makes the Top Ten
NYC's number six placement in 2025 is actually impressive given the structural disadvantage.
The city clears the density threshold in a few specific ways most US cities cannot replicate.
Manhattan Density
A six-mile radius centered on Union Square covers nearly all of Manhattan below 110th Street plus substantial parts of Brooklyn and Queens.
Within that circle, HappyCow counts over 150 fully vegan restaurants in 2025.
That is comparable to Berlin's central density, and better than any other US city achieves even in its densest neighborhoods.
A Mature Restaurant Scene That Pre-Dated the Trend
New York's vegan restaurant scene has been continuous since the 1970s. Angelica Kitchen operated for over four decades before closing in 2017.
The institutional knowledge, the staff training pipelines, and the review ecosystem all compound.
A city that has had serious vegan restaurants for 50 years scores differently than one where the first opened in 2015.
A Review Culture That Keeps the Signal Strong
Over 1,600 reviews across the central Manhattan vegan restaurant set keeps HappyCow's confidence rating high.
Cities with fewer reviews per restaurant get penalized by the algorithm, which weights signal reliability alongside raw counts.
Portland's Case for the Second American Slot
Portland is the quieter story and the more instructive one.
The city is far smaller than New York, but it scores at number seventeen for structural reasons that other American cities could emulate.
Density by Design
Portland's urban growth boundary, in place since 1979, has concentrated restaurant development in a few compact neighborhoods.
Southeast Portland, Northeast Alberta, and the central east side each hold multiple fully vegan restaurants within walking distance of each other.
HappyCow's algorithm rewards that pattern directly.
A Longstanding Food Cart Scene
Portland has treated food carts and food pods as permanent restaurant infrastructure for over fifteen years, not as pop-up novelties.
Several of the highest-rated vegan businesses in the HappyCow database are actually carts, which get counted the same as brick-and-mortar restaurants.
This boosts the density count substantially.
A Review Ecosystem That Punches Above Weight
Portland's HappyCow review volume per capita is one of the highest in North America.
Local users contribute consistently, which keeps the algorithm's confidence rating on Portland restaurants high.
Why Los Angeles Dropped
Los Angeles made the top ten in 2022 and fell out of the top 25 in 2025.
The city's raw count of vegan restaurants did not decrease. In fact it continued to grow.
What changed was the ranking methodology, which now weights central-radius density more heavily than it did three years ago.
LA's vegan restaurants are spread across a county that stretches from Santa Monica to Pasadena to Long Beach, a geography bigger than many European countries.
The six-mile HappyCow radius captures a smaller share of the city's total scene than it does in dense cities.
The practical takeaway for diners is that Los Angeles is still one of the best cities in the world for vegan food.
The ranking does not reflect that because the city's geography does not match the ranking's assumptions.
What a US City Would Need to Do to Climb
Three things, roughly in order of importance.
Cluster, not sprawl. Cities that let their vegan restaurant scene concentrate in walkable neighborhoods score better than cities where the scene spreads along highway corridors.
Austin's East Side and Minneapolis's Northeast have both done this at a smaller scale and are the plausible next US entrants to global top 25 territory.
Review culture matters. A restaurant with 20 strong reviews on HappyCow is worth more to the ranking than one with 200 scattered reviews elsewhere.
Patrons who use the HappyCow app and leave reviews materially move the needle for their city.
Fully vegan beats vegan-friendly. HappyCow's ranking heavily weights establishments that are fully vegan, not just vegan-friendly.
A city with ten dedicated vegan restaurants outscores one with 50 omnivore restaurants that happen to have vegan options.
One Last Thing
The HappyCow ranking is a useful lens, not a gospel.
The United States still has the largest absolute number of vegan restaurants of any country, by a comfortable margin. What the ranking captures is a specific question. In which city, if you had one week, could you eat the widest variety of good vegan food without a car?
That is a reasonable question. The answer in the US, in 2025, is New York.
Portland comes second. Everywhere else, the restaurants are there, but the geography makes them harder to find without a plan.
For readers planning a trip around the Korean plant-based food that is quietly reshaping American weeknight dinners, our piece on why Korean plant-based cooking is quietly taking over American kitchens covers where that scene is landing hardest.
For a broader sense of where the whole category is heading in 2026, our breakdown of 20 reasons people are going vegan this year is a decent companion read.
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