Surprise! Slutty Vegan Is Opening at Georgia Tech

A location of Slutty Vegan is opening in March on the Georgia Tech campus, adding a third Atlanta location and sixth overall in Georgia to Pinky Cole’s burgeoning vegan restaurant empire.

Located in the John Lewis Student Center on Ferst Drive, the restaurant will open for takeout and delivery and late-night food, serving Slutty Vegan favorites like the One Night Stand using vegan beef topped with vegan bacon and cheese, caramelized onions, lettuce, and tomatoes on a Hawaiian bun. Beyond its popular meatless burgers, the Georgia Tech location will offer a vegan fried shrimp sandwich and a chopped Philly cheese. The location is also open to the public.

This isn’t the first college campus, or college campus-adjacent location, for Slutty Vegan. Cole founded the vegan burger business in 2018 as a delivery service, with people contacting her via Instagram to place orders for her provocatively named meatless burgers. She quickly amassed a following, leading to a food truck and late night pop-ups around Atlanta University Center and the historically Black colleges of Spelman, Morehouse, and her alma mater, Clark Atlanta University. In 2022, a location of Slutty Vegan opened on Baxter Street in Athens on the edge of the University of Georgia campus.

Locations of Slutty Vegan are also now open in Birmingham and Brooklyn, New York, with locations opening in Columbus, Georgia, and Harlem soon.

It’s been a busy few months for Cole, which included the debut of her first cookbook in 2022, furthering her philanthropic endeavors assisting Black and brown entrepreneurs with establishing businesses, and expanding into real estate.

Cole and her business partners Aaron Mattison and Jason Crain are currently facing a lawsuit filed by a former employee of their Ponce City Market restaurant Bar Vegan alleging unpaid wages. The collective-action lawsuit claims the trio withheld a portion of employee tips for themselves and the restaurant while paying less than the $7.25. per hour federal minimum wage. The lawsuit states that tipped employees were paid $2.13 an hour and were also required to give up 25 percent of their tips to Bar Vegan and its managers and owners.

Cole, Mattison, and Crain deny all of the allegations listed in the lawsuit and are seeking to have the case dismissed.

351 Ferst Drive, Atlanta. sluttyveganatl.com.