My SA | Brothers’ vision for Hash Vegan Eats goes beyond food — and to adding a mobile location
Rogelio Sanchez beat his addiction to pills and alcohol nine years ago. In the moral reckoning that followed, he decided his love of animals required him to become vegan, eating no meat or animal products of any kind.
With his brother Michael, who is also vegan and sober, he opened Hash Vegan Eats in October 2020. They decided to locate it on the South Side, where they grew up, because so few places in the area cater to vegans. Though San Antonio is home to more than a dozen vegan restaurants, most are downtown or on the North Side.
“You can’t find that down here,” Rogelio Sanchez said. “It’s very heartbreaking because I love this side of town, but if you go up and down Southwest Military, it’s a food desert: Pizza Patron, Burger King, McDonald’s.”
The brothers’ restaurant has a long and diverse menu with dishes such as BBQ Chick-N, Phish tacos and a take on the traditional Mexican dish of pozole using jackfruit instead of pork. It also offers coffee drinks and artfully made mocktails, or non-alcoholic cocktails, as well as teas and sweets suffused with CBD, or cannabidiol.
They grew up in poverty, Sanchez said: “We didn’t know what comforter sheets were. I mean, electricity was cut off every other day — it was a really hard way to grow up.” Above the restaurant’s doorway is a portrait of their mother, who died 14 years ago as a result of alcohol and drug abuse.
“In her memory, we do this,” he said. “Because if this were available back then, when she was struggling, when she was trying to find a way out, things could have been different. With that in mind, I want to help people.”
Sanchez is open about his history as an addict, posting a picture of himself passed out next to a can of Bud Light on the restaurant’s Instagram page. The time he spent as a bartender on the River Walk helped fuel the abuse, he said. For a time, he was homeless.
That past helps him relate to those undergoing similar struggles, Sanchez said, and he wants to use the restaurant to help them. Inside, there is a small food pantry for the homeless, whom he refers to as “houseless.” In fact, Hash is an acronym for “heal and spread healing.”
Earlier this year, the restaurant stumbled after the February snowstorm cut into its revenue, leading the Texas Comptroller’s office to threaten to shut it down for delinquent tax payments. The brothers stayed in business thanks to the support of San Antonio’s vegan community and a GoFundMe campaign that raised more than $5,000. They now want to open a vegan food truck on the St. Mary’s Strip.
Rogelio and Michael recently sat for an interview to discuss the sober lifestyle, San Antonio’s vegan scene and how to make a good vegan dish. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: How did you become vegan?
Rogelio: About nine years ago I got sober, my brother and I. What happens is, when you’re a person who’s suffering through addiction, it has to happen when you’re done. You have to be like, “I don’t want to do this anymore. This is ruining my life.”
With that came a lot of self-love, a lot of me trying to figure out who I was and my place in the world, and aligning what I did in my life — whether it be what I ate, or what I drank — with my morals. I always had a strong connection to animals — until they came to my dinner plate. That assertion of, “Do you care about animals, or do you just care about pets?” really started to mess with me.
Q: It seems like San Antonio has a strong vegan scene. Is that your experience?
Rogelio: We have seen the vegan community growing in San Antonio within the last five years, even. One of the big reasons that we started this is because of our mentors. There are people in the vegan community in San Antonio who are just great friends of ours who gave us some good mentorship.
Back in the day, in Austin, there was a restaurant called Veggie Heaven and everything was completely vegan. Every day they had this section by the register that was either food that didn’t get picked up or that was mistakenly made and they put it there and the houseless community would go in and get it. Becoming new business owners, we were like, “I want to do that. I want to be able to help these people.”
Michael: It is a tight-knit community. We do kitchen takeovers for people who have a vegan pop-up but don’t necessarily have a kitchen. We’ll offer them our kitchen for a day that we’re closed. The whole point is to create a platform for other people to build the community and strengthen that community, because that’s the only reason we’re able to exist.
Q: You don’t see many vegan restaurants on the South Side, do you?
Rogelio: Definitely. One of the strongest things that we try to work on, the most important thing on the South Side, is seeing your reflection, right? I grew up in a very Hispanic barrio. In the barrio, there are a lot of things that are very beautiful about the Hispanic culture: the family element, the community element, there’s a lot of small businesses that everyone supports. Everybody kind of knows each other, those kinds of things, right? Beautiful. There’s also a lot of really bad things that no one talks about like sexism, racism, homophobia. If you’re a person who doesn’t relate to those ideologies, and you’re surrounded by people who do, you’re almost inclined to fall in line and start to act in that manner or you have to leave, right? And that’s what I did — I had to dip. I went to the suburbs, I went to Medical Center, I went to Stone Oak.
When we got the opportunity to get this space it was a no-brainer because I want to be the reflection for other young people in this area who might identify the same way that I did, that don’t see a way out and don’t see businesses around them that they agree with.
Q: Tell me about your decision to make the restaurant alcohol-free.
Michael: When you’re dealing with an addiction it’s really easy to get defeated because you built your entire life around it. So the thing with sobriety is that a lot of it is the social aspect. A lot of people, that’s how they socialize; all their friends and every interaction they have has to do with it.
Veganism and sobriety are things that have healed ourselves, spiritually, physically and mentally. (We want to) create an environment where people can come express their own selves in their own journey and see where that fits. Just be a safe space for everyone. In the year that we’ve been here, it’s created such a strong community.
Rogelio: We knew that the lifestyle of veganism and sobriety are one and the same to a lot of people, and I wanted to be able to be at least that space for them to come here, feel welcome, feel seen and heard and understood.
Q: You don’t sell alcohol, but you sell hemp products.
Rogelio: We’re alcohol-free, hemp-forward. I believe in the hidden power of plants. I think hemp in itself is a beautiful plant. CBD, CBG, CBN, CBDV, those are all beautiful elements that react to the body really well.
Michael: There are legitimate medicines that have come out of the marijuana prohibition because they’re trying to work around these legalities to get down to the molecule of each cannabis option. Delta-8 (a strain of THC that is legal in Texas) in itself has helped tons of people who don’t want to partake in regular marijuana. It’s helped people with PTSD.
Q: Tell me about the second location you want to open.
Rogelio: We have a buddy in Austin, Isaac (Mogannam), he owns Plowburger. He’s sending us a food truck on the cheap homie price, right? So that we can get it and put it on the St. Mary’s Strip in a way of manifesting a physical brick-and-mortar.
When people get out of the St. Mary’s Strip they’re hammered, and they need to eat and drink things that are going to get them back into a right state of mind. The cool thing about non-alcoholic drinks is you can sell them until six in the morning, if you want to. I can sell non-alcoholic beer to go. So we want to have the food truck be able to provide vegan food day and night and even non-alcoholic drinks.
Q: How do you come up with a good vegan recipe?
Rogelio: Honestly, you can get a regular food item and then just veganize. If you’re looking to create something that you’re familiar with, just get the same thing they usually do, and just buy the vegan versions of it in the recipe and make that into a dope, identical version of the quote-unquote “normal” thing.
The idea with our food and drinks is not to create good non-alcoholic drinks and vegan food. The idea is to create good food and good drinks that just happen to be vegan and just happen to be non-alcoholic.
Q: Do you try to replicate the dishes you had growing up?
Michael: Yeah. We do a fish-fry box, which is a cultural staple on the South Side. They do fish bricks with french fries, white bread and tartar sauce. We do our vegan fish, and it happens to be a little rectangle as well because we do it from our tofu, and it’s the way you marinate and everything and it tastes great.
Rogelio: We create things like pozole — it’s one of the things that we grew up eating and loving. It has roots in Mayan and indigenous cultures. We do it with jackfruit, completely vegan. I will leave this for the South Side, they come here and love it.
Michael: That’s the ultimate compliment when I see a little lady come here, sit down and kill the whole bowl.
Link: https://www.mysanantonio.com/sa-inc/article/Brothers-vision-for-Hash-Vegan-Eats-goes-16684768.php