The Music Wasn't Loud. They Just Didn't Like It.
Why the graffiti? Why the hip hop?
People always ask me, "Why the graffiti? Why play hip hop?" To some people, it doesn't "make sense" with veganism. I've been told it might confuse people. That it might keep customers away. And maybe it has.
I've thought about that more than I'd like to admit, especially when business gets tough. Maybe if we made the walls a little cleaner, played something safer, and made the whole thing look a little more like what people expect a vegan restaurant to look like, we'd make more money. Maybe. But I'm a New Yorker, through and through, so at some point I have to stand ten toes down and accept the consequences of being who we are.
And yes, sometimes those consequences have hurt financially. They've affected me and my family. I don't say that because I think suffering makes an idea noble. I've been in this business long enough to know that pain doesn't automatically lead to success. Sometimes pain is just pain. But I do believe there are certain things you shouldn't abandon simply because they're difficult to sell.
We believe in veganism. We believe in yoga. We believe in great roots music. We believe in hip hop. We believe in art. And we believe deeply in the beauty, chaos and culture of New York City. So when somebody asks me, "Why?" That's why. Because all of those things belong together to us.
Maybe they don't fit neatly into a marketing demographic. Maybe an algorithm wouldn't put them in the same category. But neither did the New York I grew up in. New York didn't ask whether hip hop belonged next to punk, whether graffiti belonged next to fine art, or whether a kid from Queens was allowed to walk into a yoga studio and find something there that changed his life. You just found what spoke to you. And you made it yours.
I first discovered hip hop culture around 1982 or '83. I was sitting on my fire escape looking down onto the street, probably trying to escape the one-bedroom apartment inhabited by six people. Sometimes I think I'll forever have this feeling of being cramped, like the walls are closing in on me. Thank God I eventually found yoga and learned how to breathe through some of those moments of feeling boxed in. But before yoga, there was hip hop.
And I'm not just talking about rap music. I'm talking about hip hop culture and everything it represented to me: freedom of expression, raw energy transformed into movement, art and music. An undeniable force rumbling through people's lives and souls that simply needed somewhere to come out.
I looked down from that fire escape and saw these kids in the street dancing, spinning and moving like fluid robots on top of a piece of linoleum. I knew immediately: I needed to be part of this. It spoke to me, and it sent me down a path I've been walking ever since.
Unless you were there, it's difficult to explain those early days of what would eventually become this global force known as hip hop. When it was still raw, it was beautiful. It had ZERO to do with money and almost everything to do with being the best. Be the best dancer. The best rapper. The best graffiti artist. The best DJ. If the party was good, you had success. If your clothes were crispy, you felt like a king. And if your tag was citywide, you were a God.
I wasn't particularly good at any of those things. Lucky for me, the culture still had room for me. In those days, race mattered a lot less than whether you were cool. If you were cool, you were cool. The main arbitrator of belonging was your knowledge, your overall vibe and, most importantly, whether you were actually there.
Especially in those early days, before Run-DMC helped define a visual uniform for hip hop, your value came from knowledge and BEING THERE. You had to go to the park. You had to hear the music. You had to watch the dancers. You had to know who was nice and who wasn't. Get yourself a boom box and just be around. Because being there allowed you to soak everything in until eventually it started changing your DNA.
Looking back, I realize that's something hip hop taught me that I've carried into almost everything I've done since. Writing. Restaurants. Yoga. Art. Business. How do you get good at any of it? BE THERE EVERY DAY. You can read about it. You can study it. You can watch somebody else do it. You can talk about doing it. But eventually you have to show up. Again and again and again.
When I started writing, I just wrote. I didn't think about whether I was good enough. I didn't ask anybody's permission. I wrote. And it got me far—further than most, just not quite far enough. But that's another story.
The point is that there was some indescribable force driving me to tell stories, and for a period of my life I was brave enough—or maybe dumb enough—to follow it no matter what anybody thought. Looking back, I recognize that feeling. It was the same thing I felt looking down from that fire escape. Something inside you says, Go. And you go.
It happened again with restaurants. From the moment we started working with Pamela, I knew this was where I needed to be and that somehow we were going to do something great. We had a story to tell. Pamela was from the Bronx. I was from Queens. My wife Tara was from Pennsylvania, but we gave her a pass. Haha.
But seriously, all of us understood something that apparently isn't obvious to everybody else. Hip hop and veganism made perfect sense together. To us, veganism was the diet of the rebel just like hip hop was the culture of the revolutionary—or at least that's how we grew up understanding it.
We understood that hip hop was never just music in the same way that veganism was never just a diet. They're cultures. And in their purest forms, both have the power to change the way people see the world. Hip hop taught us to question authority. Take something old and make something new out of it. Speak for yourself. Create your own language. Make something out of nothing. Don't wait for the establishment to invite you inside—throw your own party.
Veganism asks a lot of the same questions. Why do we eat this way? Who decided this was normal? Does it have to be this way? Can we do it differently? Can we do it better?
To us, "being vegan" has never just meant what you eat. It's about what you think and how you move through the world. It's questioning things we've been told are inevitable and deciding for yourself whether you want to participate in them. That's rebellion.
That's why the connection never felt strange to us. The same kid who heard "Fuck tha Police" and understood that sometimes you have to question the system could grow up, look at another system and say: Fuck your meat.
Different battle. Same rebellious spirit.
And maybe that's why the graffiti has always belonged on our walls. Graffiti might actually be the perfect metaphor for everything I'm talking about. Nobody gave those kids a gallery. Nobody handed them a canvas and said, "We'd really love to hear what you have to say." So they found a wall. A train. A rooftop. Somewhere they weren't supposed to be, and they said it anyway.
That's hip hop. That's MAKE SHIT. You don't have the perfect tools? Use what you have. Nobody gave you permission? Good. Nobody invited you into the room? Create your own room. You have something inside of you that needs to come out? Find somewhere to put it.
When we first opened the restaurant, we also made a rule: we would only play music recorded in 1999 or before. It was just a line we drew because we wanted to pay homage to the classics, whether it was food, music, art or culture. We weren't saying nothing good happened after 1999. We just wanted the restaurant to have roots.
And we played a lot of old-school hip hop. More than any other genre, it identified who we were. But it did something else too. It marked the restaurant as a safe space for a certain type of customer who, at the time, didn't have many vegan restaurants where they walked in and immediately felt welcomed or represented. That's changed tremendously over the last ten years, but back then it was different.
I remember telling the staff, "If anybody complains about the music, come get me. I'll take care of it." And of course, it didn't take long. "Are you always going to play this type of music?" "Can you turn the music down? It's loud."
The music wasn't loud. They just didn't like it.
So I'd walk over to the table and say, "Thank you so much for coming and checking us out. I really appreciate it. Unfortunately, I can't accommodate that request because the music is specifically curated and it's part of the experience we're trying to create here. We represent NYC culture. We play all kinds of roots music. You just happened to come on a hip hop night. I hope you stay and celebrate with us, but I understand if you want to leave."
And some of them left.
I'm not going to pretend that didn't bother me. Especially in those early days when every customer mattered and we were trying to survive. I'd watch two people walk out the door and immediately wonder, Am I being an idiot? The staff wondered too. Maybe we should turn it down. Maybe we should play something safer. Maybe everybody who told us hip hop and veganism didn't belong together was right.
Then something would happen.
Those two people would walk out upset because we were playing A Tribe Called Quest, and three other people would walk in off the street and say, "Yo, I heard the music and wanted to check it out. This is cool." They'd come inside, start looking at the photographs and graffiti and immediately understand what we were doing. They'd sit down. They'd eat. And inevitably somebody would say something like, "Damn, I ain't even vegan, but if this is how it is, I could do it."
And that's when I knew we were onto something.
Because those were the people we were trying to reach. We weren't building a vegan restaurant exclusively for people who were already vegan. We wanted to create a doorway into the culture for people who might never have imagined themselves walking through one.
Sometimes that doorway was food. Sometimes it was graffiti. And sometimes it was A Tribe Called Quest coming through the speakers loud enough for somebody walking down the street to hear it.
That's the spirit we're still trying to keep alive at UVK. The graffiti isn't there because some branding company told us it would make the restaurant look edgy. The hip hop isn't playing because somebody looked at our demographics and decided old-school rap would increase sales by eight percent.
It's there because it's us.
The yoga is us. The veganism is us. The blues is us. The graffiti is us. The mushroom coffee is us. The guy in the back we call The Alchemist making tea is definitely us.
It might be a weird mix. It might not make sense to everybody. And maybe, over the years, being unwilling to fit neatly into one box has cost us something. But I'd rather spend my life trying to build something authentic than wake up one day and realize I built something successful that I don't recognize.
So if you walk into Urban Vegan Kitchen and wonder why there's graffiti on the walls while hip hop is playing in a vegan restaurant, now you know.
That's why the hip hop. That's why the graffiti.
We're not trying to make it make sense.
It already makes sense to us.
Peace,
Dave