SOUTH SHORE — Chef Tsadakeeyah Emmanuel has been a vegan for more than 40 years, “preaching about veganism long before it was popular” and using his platform as a culinary professional to grow Chicago’s appreciation for vegan food.
Majani — Emmanuel’s catering company with co-owner, pastry chef and wife Nasya Emmanuel — has existed for about half his time as a vegan. The Emmanuels spent their “last dime” to open Majani Soulful Vegan Cuisine in 2017, and they have served up plant-based recipes from the South Shore restaurant ever since.
Now, the Emmanuels are plotting their latest venture: the Vegan Village food hall, planned for 3110 E. 79th St. They aim to renovate the former pregnancy clinic into a four-stall restaurant incubator and start serving meals by up-and-coming vegan chefs next spring.
“We’re trying to pass the baton and in passing the baton, see how [we can] do it in a meaningful way and create a design that can be replicated,” Tsadakeeyah Emmanuel said.
As the Emmanuels ramp up preparations for the Vegan Village, they’ll scale back Majani: The restaurant at 7167 S. Exchange Ave. will go on indefinite hiatus starting June 29.
Majani will continue offering catering services, and Emmanuel hopes to bring back the restaurant with a simplified menu — though there’s no timeline for doing so, he said.
“It’ll definitely be a new version of Majani when we re-emerge,” Emmanuel said. “We’re going to revise everything.”
The Vegan Village aims to bring four “radically different” independent vegan restaurants under one roof, with two kitchens, shared seating and outdoor dining areas.
Menus will be left to the chefs who join the project, but the “initial thought is to go with foods that are the most popular,” Emmanuel said. He envisions the first iteration of the village will include a burger and pizza joint, a soul food restaurant, a raw food eatery and a dessert shop, he said.
“We definitely want to bring some fresh ideas, some new ideas,” Emmanuel said. “We have a direction that we want the food hall to go in, based in our own experiences, but we’ll leave it up to the new chefs [to decide] what that offering will be.”
Plans also include an outdoor gathering area, which can host live entertainment, as well as nutrition counseling and weight loss and other health services, Emmanuel said.
For now, the Vegan Village would refer customers to counselors, gyms and other partners in the neighborhood, “but ideally we get to a point where all of these are on one campus,” he said.
Emmanuel hasn’t yet locked in any vendor partners, he said. He’s looking to bring on chefs who “preferably [have] some experience” and an existing customer base, he said.
“The premise is to create a space for the next generation of vegan chefs, and to provide a variety of healthy eating options for the community,” Emmanuel said.
Majani won’t be one of the vendors, nor will Emmanuel run any of the kitchens on-site. He’ll instead serve as a consultant to the other chefs, offering operational support under the Vegan Village umbrella.
“Where there’s avenues for us to collectively buy product or share an accountant or bookkeeping services so we can be efficient in that way, we will,” he said. “They’re not required to, but those services and that support would be there for them if they needed it.”
Defunct vegan food hall XMarket, which closed a year after opening in Uptown, is a rough example of what the Vegan Village aims to bring to the South Side, Emmanuel said.
But Emmanuel knocked XMarket for selling alcohol — a bar is “counterproductive to offering a healthy lifestyle,” he said. Emmanuel hopes his village’s design will also allow customers and vendors a better experience than was found at the Uptown market, which included a grocery store and required vendors to share one kitchen, he said.
Emmanuel will also look to build on his experience at the closed One Eleven Food Hall in Pullman, where Majani was a vendor from 2019 to 2022, he said.
“We can, as a collective, share the responsibilities of social media, bookkeeping, maybe even payroll,” Emmanuel said. “Collectively [managing] those aspects of running a business so that you can stay focused on what you do best is also part of the Vegan Village — allowing the chefs to be chefs.”
The Vegan Village will be a flexible concept, with “no clear blueprint” for successful vendors’ next steps, Emmanuel said. Some chefs may opt to stay with the village as their only outlet, while others may look to franchise, open their own second location off-site or move into a larger storefront, he said.
“We would like to see a business stay as long as they thrive,” Emmanuel said.
To inquire about vendor opportunities, email [email protected].
Emmanuel is crowdfunding for the Vegan Village project via the Honeycomb Credit platform. Investors can commit five-year debt securities, or loans, to the project.
The Vegan Village aims to raise $124,000 via crowdfunding. About $100,000 would go toward a down payment on the 79th Street property, with the rest split among demolition and renovation costs like permits, architectural drawings and environmental studies.
Investors must commit at least $60,000 by June 24 to receive funds through the platform, otherwise no securities will be sold and all committed funds will be returned, according to the company’s offering statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
To read the offering statement, click here. For more information on the crowdfunding campaign, click here.
Majani started as a home catering company before moving into a shared kitchen in 2007. The Emmanuels spent the better part of the next decade planning a brick-and-mortar restaurant, which aimed to fill a gap in healthy food options in South Shore.
The catering company and restaurant have offered an outlet for Emmanuel to test ideas and recipes “since the beginning,” he said.
The time and finances needed to get the Vegan Village off the ground will put Majani on the back burner for now, but Emmanuel sees the transition as natural evolution in that experimental approach, he said.
“We live in South Shore. This is our community, and we want to grow and build our community — through innovative, plant-based cuisine,” Emmanuel said. “The Vegan Village is the next step in that innovation.”
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