Never mind the Sunday roast: the only weekly vegan street food event in the UK comes to Manchester

Plant Powered Sundays is the latest offering from the people behind GRUB Food Fair and  features vegan-friendly street food and drinks, chilled-out tunes with a bit of family gardening fun thrown in for good measure.

Every Sunday from midday until 8pm, the new Mayfield development behind Piccadilly Station will transform into a massive free-entry vegan street food celebration complete with a vegan-friendly bar

It’s a similar format to the regular food fairs held by local street food events company GRUB, with a changing roster of stallholders such as The Ottomen and I Knead Pizza already lined up. This means you will be able to try a huge variety of animal-free food cooked in styles you may have never tried before.

So if you think vegan food is bland and boring, be prepared to change your mind.

We spoke to GRUB Food Fair co-founder Jules Bailey about the new concept.

What is the inspiration behind Plant Powered Sundays? 

Having been vegan myself for the last two years, I soon realised this was a massively underrepresented and much stereotyped sector of the population.

After initially asking our traders to bring a vegan option so I could eat it myself, we noticed these menu options were becoming increasingly popular. So we decided to put on a special GRUB Food Fair to celebrate all the great things the guys at Veganuary do. We wanted it to be all about great food, great drinks, great music and bags of positivity. This ended up being our best attended event ever and loads of people were asking us to do vegan stuff more often.

So ExtraVEGANza went quarterly and when we opened at Mayfield we decided to take the plunge and do something weekly. It’s a much smaller and more laid back event but we think it’s a really chilled back way to spend your Sunday. Very family friendly. We have the Green Health Alliance running gardening activities and, as far as we know, it’s the only weekly vegan street food event in the whole of the UK. We hope it grows into something really special. The dream is for it to be as big as our usual GRUB Food Fairs.

Some people call vegan food ‘rabbit food’. How do you challenge this?

This is exactly what we are hoping to achieve with Plant Powered Sundays. We want vegans and non-vegans alike to come and enjoy every mouthful and see that vegan food is exciting, colourful, flavoursome and can even be ‘proper dirty’ when you want it to be. There’ll be no rabbit food at all at our events.

Any teasers on some of the food we can expect?

We’ve managed to get most our usual traders to create vegan menus. Coming up in the next few months we’ve got Indian, Italian, Malaysian, Taiwanese, Latin American, junk food, pizza, hot dogs, parmos, Caribbean, falafel… The list goes on.

Why is it suitable for all the family?

We’d really like our Plant Powered Sundays event to feel inclusive to all. We do think all of our events are family-friendly but think that this one will be a really nice, relaxed, fun place to spend your Sundays. The gardening activities should be good fun for little ones but, to be honest, kids just seem to enjoy running around in our new place because it’s such an exciting place.

Plus we do really want to continue promoting veganism at our normal GRUB Food Fairs so that people can continue to see that vegan food is delicious without having to come to our dedicated vegan events. So we do still have a good number – an increasing number in fact – of vegan options at the normal GRUB Food Fair.

Here are just a few of the stallholders you can expect to see over the coming weeks: Nasi Lemak, Ruby’s Street Kitchen, I Knead Pizza, El Marchador, Mama Sue’s, Chaat Cart, Fat Annie’s and Street Cleaver.

So get down to Mayfield one Sunday and give it a go. Just leave the pet rabbit at home.

Mayfield, Baring Street, M1 2AD

http://www.grubmcr.com/plant-powered-sundays/