Elle Murtagh runs a quiet, woman-dominated small restaurant out of an old California-style Bungalow in the heart of the downtown, where she whips up colorful plant-based Mexican inspired dishes, like cauliflower tacos and breakfast burritos stuffed with red potatoes. Murtagh is the chef and one of four masterminds behind The Coronado PHX, a vegan eatery on a stretch of Seventh Street that has come to be known as “Vegan Street” because of its several offerings.
Murtagh, her wife, Emily, and lifelong friends John and Liz Tavarez opened Coronado PHX in 2015, serving vegan breakfast, lunch and dinner dishes.
Their working-class backgrounds and identities show throughout the property; whether it’s on the “White silence equals violence” banner that has been up outside since the Black Lives Matter protests in June or in making sure that the staff receives livable wages.
Murtagh has been a plant-based chef for nine years. She creates the dinner and brunch specials each week, but sometimes those specials are also created by the staff.
“Sometimes it’s someone asking, ‘Oh, shoot, can you make this?’ and I’m like, ‘I’ll try it,’” she said.
Veganism became popularized in the U.S. in the 1970s, but it wasn’t until 10 years ago when the interest in plant-based lifestyles increased and became mainstream. The Coronado PHX is part of that growing trend in Arizona, a state that is also home to an annual vegan food festival and a growing number of vegan restaurants featuring food from other parts of the world.
At the age of 9, she saw a rabbit killed, gutted and made into rabbit soup for Thanksgiving dinner. She became an off-and-on vegetarian then, but it wasn’t until she went to culinary school in 2012 that she began to consider a plant-based lifestyle. At the time, her brother was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer in a part of the immune system that can limit the body’s ability to fight infections. For Murtagh, her brother’s condition was the tipping point.
“As far as I know, nobody in our family has gotten that. It felt a bit of what you put in your body matters,” Murtagh said.
Murtagh is the oldest of 13 children. She said she experienced the power of community as a child when her family had to rely on food stamps to put food on the table; and also as an adult, when she too needed the extra help to feed their wife and kids, even on top of working three minimum wage jobs. These days, she uses her restaurant and the food she cooks as a way of elevating the causes and voices of marginalized groups — though it has come with a price.
One time, Murtagh said, she held a fundraiser at The Coronado PHX to support the Indigenous people protesting the Northern Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota. The event was bigger than expected and caught news attention, unleashing negative reviews on Yelp from people who had never eaten at the restaurant and even death threats over the phone.
“It got wild,” she said. “But once the community caught wind of this, people were showing up, writing positive reviews on everything and tipping the servers very well for having to answer a phone like that.”
Murtagh and her partners cried for a week, she said, but held on to their commitment to keeping their restaurant as an inclusive space.
“There’s an obligation to show up for your community. The community has shown up for us, both as a restaurant space and personally —and we try to return that,” Murtagh said. “We try to be supportive in a way that a restaurant can.”
With veganism on the rise in Phoenix, The Coronado PHX is one of at least six vegan restaurants on a 3.4-mile stretch of Seventh Street. The oldest is Green New American Vegetarian, which opened in 2010; the newest are Giving TreeCafé and Verdura, which opened last year.
“We have a couple of miles with tons of vegan restaurants that’s not a thing in most cities,” Murtagh said. “I’ve met multiple people who have come in and have literally said that part of them moving nearby was because there are so many vegan options for them to go to.”
There are many misconceptions associated with a plant-based diet, and one bing that the diet is mostly made of bad faux meats, kale smoothies or having salad all the time, which isn’t true. One of the things they try to do at CoronadoPHX, Murtagh said, is to make people unafraid of plant-based meals.
“I think everyone up and down the block tries to do those things. We’re all trying to create good food,” Murtagh said. “Not vegan food for necessarily being vegan but making really good food.”
Since opening, the CoronadoPHX had taken what Murtagh calls “a lean-in approach” with its menu by offering some meals with dairy options. But in late August, the owners changed its 95% vegan menu to 100% after learning about the dairy producer Hickman’s Family Farms trying to build a camp on its property in Buckeye to house the female inmates who work there. It was their way, Murtagh said, to stay true to their principles.
“The more we learn about this stuff we realize that there isn’t a less violent option,” she said. In an Instagram post, the owners called the camp “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
The decision to cut dairy from its menu wasn’t the only swift decision the restaurant’s owners have made during the pandemic. Even with sales down 30 to 40% and staff cut by 25%, they have found ways to raise funds for local grassroots organizations and their efforts around the Black Lives Matter mass protests during the summer.
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In July, they held a “Taco Bell Night,” recreating the Taco Bell menu using only plant-based ingredients to raise money for Cops out of Campus, an initiative to remove school safety officers from Phoenix public schools organized by the youth members of Puente Human Rights Movement, an immigrant rights group. The line of customers went around the building and up the block that night. The food sold out before closing time at 8 p.m.
Besides CoronadoPHX, Murtagh and her partners also own Dark Hall Coffee, which serves vegan French pastries. It opened, in part, as a way to move the baking out of The Coronado PHX’s tight kitchen and free up storage and prep space for the restaurant’s creations.
Even with the challenges brought by the pandemic, the owners are expecting to open another restaurant, Tiny Burgers, serving mainly plant-based burgers in downtown Phoenix in 2021.
Contact the reporter at Jpbeltra@asu.edu.
