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Image courtesy Lokal

Lokal's delicious take on a veggie burger

Unlike their meatier namesakes, veggie burgers are a more complex breed. The lack of ground beef-as-glue requires a delicate balance of proteins, veggies and other creative components to hold these patties in place. Keeping them nicely cohesive while staying simultaneously delicious is a challenge -- one that some eateries excel at over others.

With these factors in mind, Short Order took a look at Miami's veggie burger landscape and hand-picked the city's five best. (Some might even argue these outshine their beefy counterparts. We'll leave that up for debate.)

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C Lamb

Vani displays her vegan treats.

​Contrary to popular belief, vegans love cupcakes. In fact, we probably love cupcakes more than the average omnivore. More »

Camille Lamb

A customer talks with owner Hakin Hill.

​"You guys open every day?" asks a young woman at the restaurant counter while her restless four-year-old wanders about, picking up tubs of African Shea Butter and examining bins of natural chips.

"Every day except Saturday," answers owner Hakin Hill, his hair pulled back in a bulbous black Rastafari cap.

"The busiest day," scoffs the woman.

"Not here," Hakin answers calmly.

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Camille Lamb

Raw vegan Marie Jorgensen and Amanda Resto, the raw vegan chef at T.H.R.I.V.E. on Miami Beach, get goofy on juice.

​In the world of puritan health foodies, Welch's grape, Capri Sun, and even Tropicana are not acceptable examples of "juice." The word, and associated terms like "juice fasting," "juicing," or "on the juice," instead refer to the nutrient-rich liquid produced by the complete removal of skin, pulp, pits, and fiber from a fruit or vegetable, through use of specialized juice-extracting machinery.

This product was the center of celebration at the communal space above the soon-to-be-open Choices Vegan Cafe (379 SW 15th St.) Saturday night. Juice bartenders worked up a sweat as they chopped and fed pound after pound of organic produce into various juicing machines and blenders. Vegans, raw foodists, animal rights activists, open-mined laypeople, and eccentrics congregated to toast the fruits (or the juice of the fruits) of nature's genius, guzzling organic wheatgrass, sweet potato, carrot, strawberry, ginger, sunflower greens, celery, kale, beet, jalapeno, lemon, orange, and many other juices. All told, the juicesters cranked out at least 25 pitchers of unique juice cocktails throughout the night, while raw vegan DJ Golden Del (AKA Jordan Franchini-Wolfe) spun smooth house music he likes to call "organic beats." Watch this video produced by Aiden Dillard for a vivid look at the shindig:

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A. Cuevas

For both rabbits and tortoises, the fast ends with a party on the 9th

​Vegan Assassin and soon-to-be Miami restaurateur Alex Cuevas is at the helm of yet another veg-head initiative here in Miami --- a mass juice fast lasting from five to seven days. Via Facebook, 45 Miamians and friends have committed to joining one of two groups of juice fasters: the rabbits and the tortoises. Rabbits started their fasts yesterday, and tortoises link up on the 5th. The final fast day for both groups will be July 9th, when all will convene to toast a glass of wheatgrass juice at Cuevas' new (and not yet officially open) Choices Cafe (379 SW 15th Road) and celebrate their victories (which will likely include detoxing, weight loss, and mental clarity). The event runs from 7 to 10 p.m., and the health conscious public is also welcome to attend. Vegan DJ Golden Del will be spinning chill house beats for the event. Entrance fee is a bag of organic greens, ginger, lemons, green apples, or the like.  
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Camille Lamb

The entrance fee for a vegan potluck is an animal product-free dish, like this "fruits of the forest quinoa."

​At 7 p.m. Sunday, Short Order pulled up to the quiet block near Brickell where Om Garden used to be. It was a little dreary outside, but we followed some smiling, healthy looking people carrying Tupperware dishes to an open door at 379 SW 15th Road. It led to a bright stairwell from which dance music trickled down out onto the sidewalk.

Upstairs, a group of people whose appearance defies categorization was chatting over paper plates of colorful food. It was a vegan potluck hosted by vegan galvanizer Alex Cuevas, thrown directly upstairs from the site of his forthcoming restaurant, Choices Cafe. The entrance fee? A vegan or raw vegan dish, preferably home made, like the "fruits of the forest quinoa" created by Short Order. (It consists of pecans, raisins, and mushrooms sauteed with vegan Earth Balance spread, sprinkled with sea salt and turbinado sugar, folded into several cups of organic quinoa and topped with raw walnuts.)

Lightly promoted via Facebook and word of mouth, this was the fourth potluck Cuevas has thrown since the outset of his campaign to promote the vegan lifestyle, nutrition education, and the ethical treatment of animals in Miami.

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Florida beekeeper David Rukin

​There's a perception in the vegan/vegetarian community that beekeepers are perpetrators of animal abuse. They mishandle bees, stealing from them and working them into the ground by harvesting their hard-earned product. David Rukin, one of Florida's most prolific beekeepers, thinks otherwise. Rukin has been in the bzzzness since 1975, and he and his Gainesville company, BuzznBee Farm, Inc., have worked with supermarket giant Whole Foods for more than a decade.

"The reality is, everything in Mother Nature is an overproducer," he says. "An apple tree, for example, produces all those apples, but it doesn't eat apples. The apples are for other creatures to eat. Birds eat the apples, humans eat the apples, worms eat the apples. If nothing eats the apple, then it hits the ground and grows into another tree and the cycle starts over again. Humans lose sight of this because they're the only creatures that are not overproducers. Humans are takers."

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Salmonella bacteria

​British soccer stadium Forest Green Rovers Football Club recently instituted a ban on burgers and sausages. Its vegan owner first barred the team's players from partaking in red meat for "health and performance reasons," and then extended the policy to patrons as well, reasoning that if the food wasn't good enough for the players, it wasn't good enough for fans either.

We think the Miami Dolphins' Sun Life Stadium take this a step further and just ban all meat from its menus, not for the sake of being green, but to avoid potential food borne illness and death. According to ESPN's Outside the Lines and the Palm Beach Post, the stadium was rated last year as one of the worst health code violators in pro sports.

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Oprah and 378 staffers recently took a one-week vegan challenge.

​Or, "How to Succeed at Veganism Without Really Trying."

Vegans are humans too. Like most Americans, we have only so much time to dedicate to food preparation. So it is an error when outsiders ponder the vegan lifestyle and automatically throw up their hands in mock exhaustion, shouting "I'd never have time to do that!"

The truth is, if we went full-throttle vegan every day, baking quinoa loaves, peeling spaghetti squash, and hunting down wild dandelions for hippie soups, we would probably not have time for things like jobs and families. So many of us vegans truly do it "right" maybe 20% of the time, filling up the rest of our diets with vegan convenience foods like microwavable Boca Burgers, soy "chik'n," hummus, oatmeal, soymilk, trail mix, salads and fruit.

Doesn't sound too bad, right? Well, it gets worse. Do not count on the following list to help you lose 11 pounds like Oprah Winfrey's staffer did during her recent week-long vegan challenge. But for the days when a vegan seriously loses sight of concern for his health, though his karmic convictions still remain strong, there are these ten food-like products to help him just scrape by till the next Hare Krishna potluck.

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