What to Eat at Providence’s New Vegan Food Hall
A burrito at Bar Verde at Plant City.
Plant City, by chef and restauranteur Matthew Kenney, opened in June.
By Evan Fleischer
Plant City opened in Providence, Rhode Island, on June 14, a 10,000-square-foot, 225-seat food hall that gathers six vegan food businesses — four restaurants, a cafe, and a market — together in one building.
A vegan food hall is a noteworthy concept in its own right with relatively few peers: While customers might be able to compare non-vegan food halls like Boston’s Eataly, Time Out Market, and the Public Market with each other, a couple of the only other places Plant City might be able to directly compare itself against are the V Shops in Miami and the recently opened St. Mark’s Vegan Food Court in New York City.
Plant City (334 South Water St., Providence) is the brainchild of Matthew Kenney, a chef and entrepreneur known for vegan and raw cooking. He has restaurants all around the world these days, but he’s a New England native, born in Connecticut and raised in coastal Maine.
His Plant City inspiration came from El Mercado de San Miguel in Madrid, which — when he first encountered it — impressed him so much that he ended up spending a whole week there.
He also drew inspiration from — among other places — Al Forno in Providence (which you can see reflected a little bit in how the bar space is defined at New Burger, one of Plant City’s restaurants.)
But, more broadly, as Kenney told Eater when reached via email, “Plant-based cuisine is so new in terms [of its] relevancy [that] I believe ... providing a concept which allows guests to visit and simply have a coffee, or commit to a sit-down dinner, will help expand the global awareness of how incredible plant-based foods can be if well prepared and at the same time, offer nutritious, conscientious food options.”
It’s not difficult to find Plant City: If you’re heading south from RISD, Brown, or College Hill, you will find it at the corner of South Water and James Street, up against the river, as one of the few buildings standing before you hit a small stretch of greenery on your way to Fox Point and the southern tip of Providence.
Park and you can opt to make your way up a pathway to enter the building through the South Water Street side, which will take you directly up through the patio outside the building (where you will notice — among tables and chairs — some egg-pod-like wicker chairs swinging in the sunlight), or you can come down beneath some trees to enter the building through the South Main Street side.
