Chloe Coscarelli is Reclaiming her Name, Vegan Cooking at New Restaurant

Chloe Coscarelli is taking things one step at a time.

The chef and cookbook author originally gained notoriety as the first vegan winner of Cupcake Wars in 2011, which launched her career and established her as a pioneer of plant-based cuisine in the mainstream culinary world.

“I started out on my journey just becoming vegan and wanting more accessible food options, and that’s kind of how I melded my passion for cooking with my mission to make plant-based options more accessible to a wider group of people,” she told Newsweek.

Her first restaurant, By Chloe, opened in New York City’s West Village neighborhood in 2015. But she was forced out of the establishment by her “deceitful partners” in 2017, and By Chloe filed for bankruptcy in 2020, Coscarelli said in Instagram posts.

Now, she is back at her original Bleecker Street location with a new venture and a new perspective on the culinary world. Chloe, a fast-casual plant-based restaurant, opened last July.

“When I very first started, at the beginning of my career, and had my dream of my own restaurant, I imagined it to be like a very linear journey, and that just wasn’t the case at all,” she said. “[Failure] definitely taught me to just continue to put one foot in front of the other. … It’s your attitude that kind of shapes what’s next.”

In a risky industry like the restaurant business, Cascarelli said, it can be crippling to focus only on what can go wrong. Instead, she thinks about what she can accomplish each day.

“If you think too big picture about your business, it can almost just feel like there’s no hope, which isn’t true,” she said. “You do what you need to do each day to get to the next day, and you just keep growing in an incremental way to accomplish your goals. I try to always focus myself on what’s right in front of me versus all the things that could possibly go wrong or collapse with the industry as a whole.”

The restaurant business can be unpredictable, stressful and cutthroat, as any episode of The Bear will demonstrate. But Coscarelli has created an environment at her restaurant that provides an opportunity for staff to learn and grow, even when they make mistakes.

Alyssa Fasciano is the operations manager at Chloe. She has worked with Coscarelli for over a decade, starting as a cashier at By Chloe. Fasciano told Newsweek that Coscarelli has created a space where the staff is proud to work.

“She creates this environment of confidence in the people that work for her, also allowing for a zero-pressure type of vibe—and that’s not typical in the restaurant world,” Fasciano said. “We have great staff retention. Everybody loves working with her, and it’s really strange to say, but people like coming to work.”

Fasciano said the culinary industry “can harden you” as a woman because it is so male dominated, and it is common to feel undermined or not taken seriously. She said Coscarelli leads by example and shows her strength not through her words but her actions in and out of the kitchen.

“She’s really blazed a trail, and it’s her own way of doing it,” she said. “The vision we have for workplace [and] for our customers is just always going to be kindness first. We work our butts off, but we really do enjoy doing it.”

When Coscarelli first opened her restaurant 10 years ago, the buzz of plant-based eating was electric, Fasciano said. The shift to veganism was one of the most exciting pivots she’d seen in the culinary world, as people were excited about “how you can transform vegetables into something that still satiates and hits the spot,” she said.

Nowadays, social media is filled with fad diets and warnings about which ingredients or food items are better or more toxic than others. A lot of misinformation, Fasciano said, can spread online like wildfire.

“I mean, you can have somebody on TikTok create a video that goes viral, that can just absolutely annihilate your business in a matter of days.”

Coscarelli can’t control what diet trends circulate online, she can control only what she puts on customers’ plates.

Over the last few years, diet trends that focus on increasing protein intake—which many people associate with meat-centric or keto meals. But Coscarelli said many of the menu items at Chloe are packed with plant-based protein, a fact she loves to tell patrons enjoying her kale Caesar salad with tempeh, a soybean-based protein source.

“Trends in nutrition come and go, but I think that eating more plant-forward food is something that is going to forever be trending up,” she said.

Coscarelli said there are many reasons why someone tries vegan cuisine: sustainability and environmental impacts, animal welfare, religion or overall health and nutrition. Vegan eating doesn’t have to be all or nothing, she said, it “welcomes people in, wherever they’re at.”

“I never want to place too much emphasis on the label of it because even if you want to try a vegan meal once a week or [as] one component to your meal, or maybe you want to try a meatless patty in your burger, but you’re not fully ready to call yourself following a full vegan lifestyle, that’s OK,” Coscarelli said.

Her mission is to make plant-based meals more accessible for everyone.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 18.8 million people live in low-income and low-access food areas—between one and 10 miles from a supermarket. In these food deserts, access to nutritious, affordable food, like fresh produce, is limited. Meanwhile, the U.S. has more than 200,000 fast-food restaurants across the country providing cheap, convenient meals that mostly center around meat and dairy.

Coscarelli’s goal is to enable busy people to access vegan alternatives that are fast, convenient and affordable.

“This is where the creativity part comes into it, which is the part that I love the most: How do I make this crave-able and enjoyable [for] everyone? How do I make people want this, not just because they feel it’s better for them or better for the planet but because it’s actually more delicious?” she said.

This is her mission and life’s work, and her commitment to authenticity and consistency in her dishes shields her from the tumultuous nature of food trends.

“Chloe [Coscarelli] has maintained her style of food throughout a decade, and even before that, you can find her on YouTube doing these same-style recipes,” Fasciano said. “We really found something that people enjoy, and we keep it really simple and consistent, and people come back.”

Creativity is an essential part of what Coscarelli does every day. She recently joined a panel on fostering creativity while growing profits at Newsweek‘s recent Women’s Global Impact Forum on August 5, 2025. On the panel, Coscarelli said that creativity is “the heartbeat” of her business.

“It’s why our customers come to us; it’s why our team works with us,” she said on the panel. “We try to keep things fun. Because I think having fun is what drives creativity, and I always tell our team, if we’re not actually having fun, then our customers aren’t having fun, and they can feel that.”

To achieve this balance, Coscarelli said, hiring the right team is paramount. Having a solid support system enables her to scale her business and navigate the ups and downs of the industry.

“I’m lucky enough to have had an amazing team around me, and through a lot of that turmoil, it makes you appreciate how if you do work with the right people that see the same vision as you, even if it takes you longer to get there, anything is possible at the end of the day,” she said.

When her last business was taken away from her, Coscarelli said it seemed that it was the end of her career. But now, she trusts that she and her team “will always find a way” through challenging times because they are all driven by a greater shared mission.

“Through everything that she’s had to endure, she’s just handled it all with so much grace,” Fasciano said. “I’m really proud of her being able to come back and reopen her concept her way. For people who are in this industry, especially as females, it can send a really great message about the fact that there are bad people, but then you see Chloe and how she’s been able to overcome and do what she loves, which is giving people really good food at an affordable price.”

In many ways, Coscarelli is returning to the basics with Chloe.

At this point in her decade-long career, Coscarelli said, she’s measuring success in the small moments.

She enjoys the tiny interactions with customers at the restaurant. They often tell her how her food has changed their health or their perspective on vegan meals or how her story has inspired their own career.

“Everyone’s driven by something different. For me, it’s in those small moments or when I’m watching someone eat, and I see a reaction from them—it feels really gratifying,” she said.

For any women looking to make it in the culinary world, Coscarelli advises honing the perspective you want to share through your food and “don’t listen to anyone that tries to tell you that you’re not good enough or you can’t do it or the industry’s too hard or stacked against you.”

“Believing in yourself above everyone else at the end of the day is the only way forward,” she said. “And the more that we can all pursue our passions and support each other, the more we can achieve.”