Mellow Mushroom Mellow Mushroom

Mellow Mushroom's Mega Veggie Pizza

Dining out with dietary restrictions — whether voluntary or not — can be really difficult. Though I appreciate a helpful and knowledgeable waitstaff who can tell me all I need to know about the ingredients in menu items, I really prefer when restaurants make note of items as vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, etc. on the actual menu. For example, Arnold Myint’s restaurants (PM, BLVD and Suzy Wong’s House of Yum) and The Sutler (among others) have a code system for each dish that meets dietary restrictions. And Porta Via makes notes that items can made vegan or gluten-free. Other restaurants devote entire portions of their printed menus to the more common requests.

Recently, Mellow Mushroom has introduced a “Vegan Favorites” menu, now available nationwide. Mellow Mushroom has offered vegan pizza crust and non-dairy cheese (Daiya) for pizza for quite some time, but has introduced new items as well as highlighting vegan offerings. They’ve also created a gluten-free and vegan “ancient grains” pizza crust.

The vegan menu includes their already-popular Mega-Veggie Pizza, Thai Dye Pizza and Gluten-Free Veg Out Pizza, as well as vegan pretzels, hummus, Greek salad, spinach salad, the house calzone and three types of hoagies (with both tofu and tempeh offered as proteins).

The local online menus aren’t set up to show the vegan menu (the gluten-free menu PDF is online, however), but you can easily see what options are available by viewing the special diets menu and choosing which ingredients you want to avoid. Mellow Mushroom has locations in Nashville (212 21st Ave. S.), Franklin (317 Main St. downtown), and Murfreesboro (2955 South Rutherford Blvd.).