New plant-based restaurant to open in Cape

Several years ago, when Laura Schumpert transitioned to a plant-based diet, she noticed several consequences.

“I felt great. You start feeling different; start feeling better,” she said. “But you lose any way of eating out at all. You just lose that option.”

So she began cooking for herself, and said meal by meal, each new recipe helped open a world of flavors and dishes she had never considered.

The experience led her to bring a new restaurant to Cape Girardeau — Trio — which will open this summer with a menu entirely free of animal products to provide area residents a plant-based option for dining out.

She said she’d adopted her own plants-only diet assuming it would mean a significant restriction, but said she found instead a veritable cornucopia of new plant-based options.

“People think plant-based eating is very limited but nothing could be further from the truth,” she said. “As opposed to [conventional diets based on] the six animals we eat.”

Her new restaurant will be at 1027 Broadway in a space previously occupied by Dexter Queen barbecue. It will offer a mix of “comfort foods” and traditional healthy options, Schumpert said.

“It’s going to be the food people already like, just plant-based,” she said.

That, she said, is where much of the creativity of plant-based cooking comes in: using cauliflower instead of chicken for buffalo wings or cooking up spicy Thai chili.

“We still have cheese,” she said. “It’s just not dairy cheese. It’ll be coconut, cashew or almond-based.”

Or, in the case of barbecue sandwiches, she said her cooks are able to substitute pulled pork with specially-prepared jackfruit. The one thing that won’t be on the menu, she said, is a veggie burger. Everyone does them, she said, even Burger King.

“It seems like they’re everywhere,” she said. “People are sick of veggie burgers in general. So we’re trying to offer something that you’re not going to find plant-based somewhere else.”

The restaurant’s appeal, she said, will hopefully extend far beyond the vegetarian crowd as well.

“We want the general public to come in and enjoy themselves, not just people who are already eating plant-based diets,” she said. “Some of the general public are already eating plant-based meals once or twice a week.”

That partial adoption of plant-based eating, she said, has been a growing trend in recent years.

“I would have thought someone would have done it by now,” she said of the idea of starting a plant-based restaurant in Cape Girardeau. “So we just decided to take it in our own hands.”

tgraef@semissourian.com

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