Spiral Diner & Bakery opened its door on August 21, 2002. But first, let’s go back a little further than that. The founder of Spiral Diner & Bakery, Amy McNutt, while making a short film about factory-farmed cows in California she learned about the heartless practices of the dairy and egg industries. Overnight this experience turned the long time vegetarian into a vegan. Amy began to research and study the plight of animals, soon extending her studies to environmentalism as well. She began to take part in educational activism and tried her best to keep an open dialogue with people about Veganism and its relation to the environment. In doing this she discovered that most people, once they have a total understanding of Veganism, agree it’s a necessary step for survival on this planet. However, they have difficulty changing their lifestyles for lack of access to information and most importantly, GOOD VEGAN FOOD. So, after a year of working in the film industry Amy decided to move on to her other love: Food. In an attempt to provide delicious cruelty-free and organic food to those who need it most she left L.A. and moved back home to Texas where she opened Spiral Diner in Fort Worth.
The original location was a small lunch counter at the Fort Worth Rail Market in downtown. There was only 800 square feet of kitchen space, 5 employees, and less than ten items on the menu! After being open a few months Amy and James started dating and after only two months they got hitched. Turns out that James was an old school vegan foodie himself so he quit his lucrative job as a bounty hunter and immediately joined Amy to help run Spiral.
After a year and a half at the Rail Market Spiral was bursting at the seams. The customer base was growing and growing and they were running out of space in the kitchen. They needed a bigger and better place. With financial support from Amy’s wonderful mom and many regular customers who came on board as lenders the move to Magnolia was on. They found an old gutted building in the Near Southside and along with the landlord’s help were able to fix it up. And on their second anniversary Spiral Diner Fort Worth was born anew. With fancy new digs and expanded menu Spiral quickly became a Fort Worth institution and a destination for vegan travelers. All the while they kept a great core crew of employees that stuck with them through thick and thin. In 2007 Spiral pulled off a real coup: The little vegan restaurant in Cowtown, TX was awarded Best Vegetarian Restaurant in America by VegNews magazine!
(That’s right, Texas!).
In 2006, Sara Tomerlin, a recent TCU grad and longtime Spiral employee decided she wanted to share good vegan food with the rest of DFW and she asked if she could open a Spiral Diner in Dallas. Since Sara’s the best, Amy said “yes”. In February of 2008, after two long years of planning and location hunting, Spiral Diner Dallas opened its doors. Located in a beautiful old neighborhood in Oak Cliff, Spiral Dallas has quickly become a second home for many locals and for the 20 employees who work so hard to make the place awesome.
In January of 2008 Spiral Fort Worth’s wonderful and amazing longtime manager, Lindsey Akey, took over ownership of Spiral Fort Worth. Lindsey’s supernatural work ethic and brains for miles make Spiral Fort Worth awesome. As does the positivity and hard work of our 20 Fort Worth employees who work their little butts off every day in the name of good vegan food and
cool customers.
Today, Amy and James still own and run the company as benevolent overlords while Lindsey and Sara own and run their respective locations. This allows them have more time to work on recipes, teach cooking classes, work on filmmaking and plan the opening of an art house theater in Fort Worth. They love their customers and co-workers who have given them the opportunity to do what they love most… save animals and watch movies!
Spiral Diner & Bakery is a 100% vegan and mostly organic restaurant in the middle of “Cowtown” (Ft. Worth). In addition to always serving delicious vegan meals that appeal to both herbivores and carnivores, Spiral Diner pledges to:
Spiral Diner’s prices are set as low as they can possibly go. Our goal is not to make tons of profit; it is to provide the community with tasty vegan food at a reasonable cost. Our goal is also to pay everyone working at Spiral a decent wage. We will never charge more than we absolutely have to in order to pay the bills.
So when you eat at Spiral you know you are getting high quality food from happy employees.
Additionally, we will continually to adjust our prices to reflect food costs. As organic ingredients go down in price we adjust our menu prices accordingly. The more in demand organics become, the lower the price.
“Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds? … It is certainly not lions and wolves that we eat out of self-defense; on the contrary, we ignore these and slaughter harmless, tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us, creatures that, I swear, Nature appears to have produced for the sake of their beauty and grace. But nothing abashed us, not the flower-like tinting of the flesh, not the persuasiveness of the harmonious voice, not the cleanliness of their habits or the unusual intelligence that may be found in the poor wretches. No, for the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being.”
-Plutarch (Greek philosopher and moralist)
