These are our favorite sandwiches and places to go for a good vegan lunch in Asheville. You will recognize a number of these restaurants from our previous food guides, including our overall favorites, vegan desserts, and vegan breakfast guides, and we have several new places we are mentioning for the first time too.
Smokin’ Onion
The Town Gyro from Smokin’ Onion is one of our favorite vegan sandwiches in Asheville. It is house shaved marinated and grilled seitan wrapped in their house pita with mixed greens, cucumber, tomato, diced onion, and a drizzle of house tzatziki. Get it with the french fries. You can order it from the food truck on Tuesdays in the River Arts District at New Belgium Brewing or at the main restaurant in West Asheville, which is open Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.
The other top pick is the Cluckin’ Good, which is a fried chick’n sandwich with smoked onion jam and a honey mustard aioli. We also love their other lunch options, including the Trashy Burger, which is a tasty vegan cheeseburger made famous by the Trashy Vegan restaurant that used to be in this location, and the Chick’n Caesar wrap.
Asheville Sandwich Company
If you are down by the airport in Arden or South Asheville, the Asheville Sandwich Company is tucked into a shopping plaza near the big shopping center with Lowe’s, Best Buy, Target, and more. They have a pretty sizable vegan menu with seitan, tofu, cauliflower, and burger options.
Having lived in Philadelphia for a time, we can appreciate the challenge of finding a good cheesesteak, so the Vegan Philly is our top pick here. It has grilled seitan with diced onions and melted vegan provolone, and it definitely satisfies the craving. Get the thin cut fries too. You can thank us later.
The Vegan Reuben is good as well. It has sautéed seitan on marbled rye with tangy kraut, vegan provolone, and house made vegan thousand island. There is also a tofu banh mi, a cauliflower banh mi, the Big Sur burger, a buffalo cauliflower sandwich, and a few variations on the Philly, including a loaded one and one with hot peppers.
Our one wish is that for all of the sandwiches, they would slice the seitan instead of cutting it into cubes, but the flavors are good nonetheless!
Simple Cafe and Juice Bar
You might remember our praise for their breakfasts in an earlier guide, but for lunch, this is all about the banh mi. We really like this sandwich from Simple Cafe a lot. It is probably our favorite seitan-based sandwich, and we especially appreciate the flavor and the way the seitan is sliced. The roll is big and crispy on the outside, the mushroom walnut pate is creamy and delicious, and the pickled carrots give it a nice accent. There is a good spicy mayo in there, and the fresh cilantro and jalapenos give a great extra kick at the end. The combination of flavors and textures is excellent. If we are in West Asheville and it is lunchtime, this is definitely at the top of the list. Simple has other good vegan sandwiches too, like their Vegan Crunch Wrap Supreme and Vegan Reuben.
Gypsy Queen
Gypsy Queen in West Asheville has a bunch of vegan wraps if you are looking for a tasty Middle Eastern meal. Our favorite is the Vegan Not Lamb Shawarma Wrap. It has homemade seitan with Lebanese seven spice, garlic aioli called toom, lettuce, tomato, red onion, parsley, and vegan mint cucumber sauce.
The Yum Yum Wrap, Falafel Wrap, and Beet Shawarma Wrap are worth checking out too.
Pulp + Sprout
Pulp + Sprout has a roasted mushroom-based banh mi and it is delicious. The sesame cabbage slaw and the sriracha aioli give this one a great flavor mix too. This is our go to lunch when we are in North Asheville.
La Rumba
La Rumba deserves a longer write up because their vegan menu is massive and probably the biggest vegan menu in all of Asheville. We will get back to them in a future food guide. For now, since we are specifically talking about handhelds, you need to know about the vegan Burrito de la Casa. It has chorizo, cheese, avocado, pico de gallo, corn, rice, and refried black beans.
They also have a wide variety of tacos, including tacos al carbon with vegan chorizo or vegan ground protein, mushroom tacos, avocado tacos, and much more. We will devote additional time to talking about how delicious La Rumba is in the near future!
White Duck Taco Shop
White Duck Taco Shop has several locations in Asheville and further south in Hendersonville and Greenville. The South Asheville location has the best outdoor seating, and Downtown Asheville is right by Pack Square. We still miss the River Arts District location that got wiped out by the hurricane, but hopefully it will reopen someday.
Most of their tacos can be made with tofu or jackfruit, and many of the sauces are vegan. While only a few tacos are marked as vegan, you can order almost any of them with the right substitutes. Ask for the vegan aioli. They have their falafel-based taco (The “Zorba”) and Bahn Mi Tofu taco, but our favorite is actually the Thai Peanut Chicken with jackfruit substituted in. The Bahn Mi is good but just know the tofu isn’t heated up. That said, sitting outside eating tacos and drinking frozen Cheerwine slushies makes for a delightful afternoon.
Black Bear BBQ
If you want a vegan BBQ sandwich, our top pick is Black Bear BBQ in East Asheville. They can do their “veg-e-que” with either soy curls or jackfruit on a sandwich. We love soy curls, so this one was a hit for us.
What puts this place over the top is that their cornbread is vegan. They also have a good list of vegan sides, including baked beans, collard greens, baked potatoes, green beans, vinegar slaw, cucumber salad, and kettle chips.
Wrapping Up
Asheville has a lot of great vegan lunch options, and these are the ones we go back to again and again. Coming up next time will be nice places to go for dinner, especially if you have out of town guests or are visiting Asheville yourself. Asheville has some good restaurants for fine dining. We are casual here, so we have very few truly fancy places, but several of them have vegan options that are worth making the effort to go get.
Asheville Vegan Map
Here is a map with all the places from this guide so you can plan your meals around town.
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