LOS ANGELES, United States — Even if you have never eaten food from
Monty’s Good Burger, there is a good chance it’s crossed your path on the internet. It
could have been the photo of Joaquin Phoenix celebrating his 2020 Oscar win by
biting into a Monty’s a burger with Rooney Mara, or Travis Barker and Kourtney
Kardashian sharing a Monty’s Oat Matcha Latte shake, “Lady and the Tramp”
style.
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Maybe you’ve seen
Billie Eilish post about her likeness on the wall of Monty’s in Echo Park, or
liked the photo of YouTube star
Emma Chamberlain in the restaurant’s trucker
hat. You could have simply seen the fries and vegan dipping sauces tagged at
Coachella.
“Every
collaboration we’ve done has come from one of us having that person’s phone
number — they’re a friend,” said Lexie Jiaras, 28, a founder of Monty’s, of the
high-profile people who have helped create a subculture around the plant-based
burger chain. “Someone comes into the store that’s a friend of ours, who’s a
creative, and who we think would be a good fit.”
Lexie Jiaras and Nic Adler, who founded Monty’s Good Burger along with Bill Fold, at one of the restaurants in Los Angeles, on May 27, 2022.
The majority of
people who have contributed to success of Monty’s, which sells plant-based
burgers, chicken, fries, Tater Tots, and shakes at six locations in
Los Angeles, are not famous. They are families, fans leaving Dodger games,
tourists, vegans, and those who may eat an entire double cheeseburger and never
know it is not meat.
The approach to
getting them in the door, however, has borrowed from music industry tactics
rather than conventional food-industry wisdom. Three of the working founders —
Nic Adler, Bill Fold, and Jiaras — have connections to Goldenvoice, the concert
and festival conglomerate that operates Coachella.
Fold is the
Goldenvoice festival producer; Adler, its former culinary director (he also
owns Sunset Boulevard’s Roxy Theater); and Jiaras is a creative consultant for
Coachella who advises on marketing, merchandise, sponsorship, and more.
The majority of people who have contributed to success of Monty’s, which sells plant-based burgers, chicken, fries, Tater Tots, and shakes at six locations in Los Angeles, are not famous.
The three friends
have built a successful, self-funded vegan burger chain during a period in
which restaurants have been imperiled, almost by accident. “Transparently, Bill
and I just missed In-N-Out Burger,” said Jiaras, who has been in a relationship
with Fold for seven years (both are vegans). “The only burger options felt
fancy — a sit-down place with a white tablecloth, where you pay upwards of $30
for this fluffy bun burger. We just wanted to smash our hands on a burger, eat
some fries, and dip them in a shake.”
In 2018, the
couple started developing a concept for a vegan In-N-Out in Fold’s hometown,
Riverside,
California. They asked Adler, a friend and the owner of Nic’s on
Beverly, to help with recipe development using Impossible Meat — a soy and
potato protein ground beef replacement that had recently come on the market.
Jiaras’ friend drew a photo of her rescue schnoodle, Monty, eating a burger,
and the image became the brand’s logo and namesake.
Zander Lyskin and Ellie Breeden sink their teeth into sandwiches at a Monty’s Good Burger in Los Angeles, on June 18, 2022.
“We were playful,
because we weren’t really focused on profit,” she said. The group planned to
open Monty’s in a location in the Riverside Food Lab, and when construction was
delayed, they plugged their new business into the circuit they knew best:
festivals.
“We did Camp Flog
Gnaw, Coachella, Stagecoach, all those fun places — so you could only get
Monty’s at a really cool place for the entire summer of 2018,” Jiaras said. The
festivals proved ideal for developing their menu. “You get real-time feedback
from people,” Adler said. “You can see it on their faces.”
When the Riverside
location and another branch in Koreatown opened at the end of 2018, insights
from the music industry continued to shape strategy. “We use the word
‘anti-marketing’ a lot — and I think you see that more in the music world, of
not going the traditional route,” Adler, 49, said. “We’re more the street team
that’s getting out on the corner, passing out a cool flyer.” (Monty’s estimates
it has given out a million stickers.)
“We’ve treated
Monty’s almost the way you would treat a young band that you found at a
300-person club that was selling out,” he said. “We didn’t put a lot of focus
into trying to get the culinary world to love Monty’s. Our goal was to get
musicians, skaters, people in fashion and dog lovers to love Monty’s.”
When Jiaras
described the opening of the Koreatown location, it sounded more like a
thumping nightclub. “There was a huge line to get in, Nic was working the door,
I was making shakes, there were long days,” she said. “It felt like we were
working a show.”
The founders also
credit a vegan community that, as Jiaras put it, “goes hard for a new
restaurant,” and has only recently had compelling alternatives to beloved
mainstream cuisine, including options that aren’t billed as puritanical, or
even healthy. Adler, who has been vegan for 25 years, has spent much of his
career cultivating a community through Nic’s, and the Eat Drink Vegan Festival.
“I helped bring influencers into the plant-based scene,” he said.
“Over time,
Monty’s has transitioned from only a place that vegans go to a place that
everyone goes, and now probably more non-vegans than vegans,” Adler said. That
crossover appeal has grown thanks to appetizing innovations like Impossible and
Beyond Meat.
Their concept
comes at a time when consumers — particularly Gen Z — are increasingly
interested in plant-based food. The Good Food Institute, a global nonprofit
that works to accelerate alternative protein innovation, has reported that
sales of plant-based food grew almost twice as much as animal-based foods in
2020, with plant-based meat cited as the fastest-growing category behind milk
and dairy alternatives.
Over time, Monty’s has transitioned from only a place that vegans go to a place that everyone goes, and now probably more non-vegans than vegans.
“Monty’s has
really taken this concept and inspired people through branding and great food,”
said Taylor McKinnon, a founder of Mr. Charlie’s, a recent headline-grabbing addition
to the plant-based fast food landscape in Los Angeles. “They gave people a
reason to think about being plant based. If there was no Monty’s, I don’t know
if Mr. Charlie’s would exist.”
Mr. Charlie’s
joins a growing field of fast-casual vegan burger chains in Southern
California, but so far, only Monty’s has a stream of public support from
celebrities (that may change, as Kevin Hart and Leonardo DiCaprio recently
announced investments in plant-based burger chains). Many high-profile fans,
like Finneas, Travis Barker, and Vince Staples, do custom shake collaborations,
with $1 from each donated to an animal charity. (Barker, a longtime friend of
Fold’s, was given a percentage of the company at its inception.) Some stars
also develop custom merchandise with Monty’s.
“Merchandise has always been important to me
as an individual,” Jiaras said. “It was important for people to have something
to take home that would represent a good feeling they had at Monty’s and would
become part of their life.” By volume, Monty’s sells more burgers and shakes
than merchandise (about 1,200 burgers daily across all locations), but it rakes
in more revenue from clothing, the company said.
Customers at a Monty’s Good Burger, from left: Josh Savoie, Raven Leon, Jason Savoie and Emily Ayala, place orders at at one of the restaurants in Los Angeles, on June 18, 2022.
The team pays
close attention to fashion trends. “It seems like hearts and light baby colors
have been really big in the past year, so we wanted to incorporate them into
everything,” Jiaras said of a recent drop. “And when we saw the rise in vintage
Harley Davidson tees, we wanted to do something with lightning bolts.”
Monty’s does
little in the way of traditional marketing, though it did put up 15 billboards
in Los Angeles in the past year. But the founders — who are all Disneyland
acolytes, and have modeled their customer experience after the theme park,
including a birthday pin — say they grapple with the brand outpacing the food.
They tried to put a pristine photo of the burger on the billboard, but they
felt like it got lost. They replaced it with a photo of Monty.
“We’ve eventually
come to see Monty’s as a platform,” said Jiaras, who has a large following on
TikTok, where she regularly reviews fashion and weighs in on zeitgeisty news.
For a chain that has been nurtured on social media, visuals are paramount, and
Jiaras and Adler are constantly analyzing how the brand is tagged.
Early on, Instagram
was how they knew they were onto something. “We had some idea that we were
going to be somewhat successful when we saw suitcases come into Monty’s,”
recalled Adler, of the place becoming a bucket-list stop in Los Angeles.
Shortly afterward, there was
the “Instagram photo dump,” he said, referring to the trend of posting a
slideshow of quotidian images, from the manicured to the mundane. “We started
to see photos of the Santa Monica Pier, Disneyland — and Monty’s,” he said.
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