There’s no shortage of veggie burgers in the Bay Area, but few, if any, come as tricked out as the overstacked, gloriously grease-laden specimens at Malibu’s Burgers in Oakland, where one-time food truck entrepreneur Darren Preston plies his plant-based trade. Along with partners Natasha Fernández-Pérez and Wahid Brown, Preston has made a name for himself by flipping the old vegan-food-as-health-food paradigm on its head.
Now, the Piedmont Avenue spot is ready to turn its attention toward another vegan food genre that’s in need of a revamp: breakfast. Specifically, Preston wants to serve the kind of classic diner breakfast that you might find at your prototypical East Coast greasy spoon—a relative rarity in the Bay Area in any form, much less at a restaurant that’s 100-percent vegan.
“We deserve hash browns, omelettes, pancakes and all that good stuff,” Preston wrote in an Instagram post announcing the new breakfast menu. In the coming weeks, the restaurant will roll out its “Malibu’s Diner” breakfast menu a few new dishes at a time, with the first omelettes coming off the flat top as early as Sunday, Dec. 5.
Preston’s affinity for East Coast diner fare comes honestly: He was born in Brooklyn and moved to Jamaica, Queens as a kid. “There’s diners everywhere there,” he says. “There was a diner on the corner of my block. I still remember the excitement of, ‘
Oh, we’re gonna go to the diner.’ To me, that’s nostalgia.”The Bay Area, on the other hand, doesn’t really have that kind of diner culture, Preston explains. You can’t find an unfussy, New York–style short-order breakfast spot on every other street corner. And after Preston went vegan in 2011, he says the options became even more limited. It’s not that the Bay Area doesn’t have an abundance of vegan restaurants that’ll serve you pancakes and an egg substitute for breakfast. But many of them still lean toward that health food model. The dishes tend to be more wholesome; they might have more of a California twist.
