Before there was an Impossible Whopper, there was Chloe Coscarelli and her cashew cheese vegan burgers. She was the queen of plant-based eating before it was cool; a visionary young chef whose eponymous fast casual restaurant, By Chloe, which opened in 2015, taught diners that vegan versions of their favorite treats could be just as scrumptious as the originals, helping to sow the seeds of the movement’s current mainstream explosion. The proliferating chain, often described in the press as a vegan Shake Shack, had lines around the corner. Coscarelli, then only 27 years old, was its face, a rising star in the male-dominated food industry named to several 30 under 30 lists.
And then, just as quickly as it had all began, the dream came crashing down. In 2017, she was pushed out of the business she co-founded by her partners, leaving her legions of adoring, quinoa taco salad-addicted fans to wonder, what happened to Chloe Coscarelli?
“Opening By Chloe was probably the best experience of my life,” Coscarelli tells me when we sit down over butternut squash nachos a week ago. “And when I stepped away from By Chloe, that was probably the worst.” She spent the years that followed her exit waging a legal battle to win her business, and her name, back. “Imagine walking around the city that you’ve always dreamed of living in, seeing your own restaurant and name everywhere, but knowing that you can’t really go in because, even though the restaurant is your namesake, you are no longer welcome,” Coscarelli says. “It was taken from you.”
“For so long, I had no choice but to compartmentalize my identity,” she continues. “Close friends and family knew the storm I was weathering, but the vast majority thought I was involved with By Chloe, which was growing rapidly. Much of my community viewed me as a success during a part of my life where I felt anything but successful. It was an immensely difficult experience, but an important one too—one that gave me a profound understanding of exactly who I am and what I want.”
Coscarelli and her former partners ultimately reached a settlement in 2022. Until then, all she could do was “keep putting one foot in front of the other, and doing what I could to keep creating recipes, and working, and hoping that someday I would get my name back,” she says. “And now, here we are…” she adds, opening her arms to the dining room around her.
Where we are is inside 185 Bleecker Street, the same address where Coscarelli opened the original By Chloe back in 2015. It’s a full circle moment for the chef, now 36, who, just two days earlier, opened a new restaurant in the same space. The “By” is gone, it’s just “chloe.” now. (The punctuation leaving no questions.) Also gone is the black-and-white design and Instagram-famous swinging basket chairs in favor of an updated color palette and a family-style oak table.
Coscarelli first returned to the location in July 2023 after hearing it was up for rent. “My first thought was, well that’s a shame—all that for nothing. And my second thought was, maybe I should go look at it.” She took a tour the next day. “I looked around and thought, oh it’s perfect... oh right, of course it is, because I built it exactly how I wanted it,’” she says. “There’s something about this street corner, the walls—I can’t put my finger on it, but I’ve always been pulled to it. I feel like this space is my space.”
The menu at chloe. is an amalgamation of Coscarelli’s greatest hits—updated versions of her and her team’s favorite recipes from over the years, drawn from the original restaurant, her four cookbooks, and various pop-ups she’s hosted and special menus she has created. Even the chocolate strawberry cupcakes, which propelled her to become the first-ever vegan chef to win the Food Network’s Cupcake Wars are on offer. “When I left By Chloe, it felt like I started something that I didn’t get to finish,” Coscarelli says. “So the past two and a half days of being here, it feels complete—just being able to feed people again.”
Coscarelli became vegan 20 years ago, when she was 16: “When I made the connection that eating animals was actually eating animals, I was like, oh, do we have to be doing that?” She and her mom started working together in the kitchen of the Los Angeles home where she was raised to make plant-based versions of family recipes. Coscarelli proudly remembers one year when her concoctions were the most in-demand at Thanksgiving. “What that taught me was if vegan food is prepared a certain way, it can appeal to everybody,” she says. “It doesn’t just have to be vegan food for people who are vegan. That’s what really inspired me to create more recipes like that.”
She attended the University of California, Berkeley, earning a bachelor’s in sociology and dance, but it was obvious her passion was elsewhere. “If it was during finals, I’d be like, ‘Oh man, I have to study.’ But if it was someone’s birthday or a dinner party, I would happily pull an all-nighter prepping for it. So it was very clear to me that this was what I loved.”
After college, she moved to New York City to attend culinary school at the Natural Gourmet Institute and Cornell University’s plant-based nutrition program. It was the early days of the plant-based movement and Coscarelli felt that she and her classmates were on the forefront. She remembers lining up a dozen or more different coconut whipped cream variations and narrowing them down to the winner. “Now you can buy coconut whipped cream in a can at Kroger’s, but at the time, we were like, ‘We think we’ve got it!’” She worked in restaurants here and there afterward, but a desire to develop recipes and share them with the world stayed with her.
One day, Coscarelli came across an open casting call for Cupcake Wars online. “I just thought it would be a fun way to put my recipes out there,” she says of her decision to apply. After she was cast, she had to call the producers back because she had neglected to tell them she would be using only plant-based ingredients. “I was like, ‘Is that okay?’ And they just shrugged and said, ‘Uh yeah, sure, I guess.’” When she beat out all of the regular cupcakes she thought, something is really here. “I was just so excited about showing a wide audience that this food doesn’t have to be what they might have thought it was,” she says.
After publishing her first cookbook in 2012, Chloe’s Kitchen, which she dedicated to her mom, she began thinking about starting her own restaurant. “People would always say to me, ‘I would totally be vegan if you cooked for me every day.’ And that got me thinking, how can I cook for people every day? I wanted to feed people, not just give them tips and tricks and wish them luck.”
She searched around for a partner and found Esquared Hospitality; in January 2014, she pitched them on her idea for a vegan fast casual chain. In July 2015, Coscarelli and her partner Esquared Hospitality’s Samantha Wasser opened the first By Chloe. On the surface it was a massive success and, by 2017, the chain had grown to five locations in New York City and outposts in Los Angeles, Rhode Island, and Boston. But behind the scenes things were far less rosy.
According to legal documents filed by Coscarelli, less than a year after the first location opened, the partnership with ESquared soured. In a lawsuit filed in June 2016, Coscarelli alleged that ESquared repeatedly attempted to modify the terms of the ownership agreement in an attempt to eliminate her right to control the business, her recipes, and the character of the restaurants. When Coscarelli refused to negotiate, according to her complaint, she was warned to “bring a bodyguard” to future meetings with Esquared’s CEO Jimmy Haber (Wasser’s father).
That sparked a dizzying array of lawsuits and countersuits, including various claims of trademark infringement on both sides, that lasted the better part of a decade. The back and forth saw Coscarelli forced out of the company in 2017; an arbitrator reinstated her ownership stake in 2020. “I felt like I had two choices,” Coscarelli tells me. “I could either give up, do something totally different and forget about my name, or I could keep fighting and believing that someday I could get it back.”
After Coscarelli’s ownership stake was reinstated, ESquared filed for bankruptcy and in 2021, some of the original investors bought the assets and rebranded the chain under a new name, Beatnic. (Beatnic currently has two locations; in April 2024, it was acquired by the fast casual Indian food chain, Inday; the remaining Beatnic locations will be turned into Inday restaurants.)
In September 2021, Coscarelli posted a “final update” about By Chloe on her social channels, writing, “The By Chloe era has come to an end—an outcome that is both sad, and if I’m being totally honest, probably for the best. While the world has been devouring cheerfully branded food adorned with my name, I’ve been in court fighting to regain it. The truth is that By Chloe hasn’t actually been by Chloe since 2017.”
Ultimately Coscarelli and Esquared settled their legal disputes in 2022 and the terms of the agreement have not been released, though Coscarelli is clearly no longer blocked from using her name professionally.
Near the end of Coscarelli’s final update on By Chloe, she mentioned that her thinking has evolved on the choice to build a business around a personal brand. Given everything she’s been through, I ask if she thought twice about putting her name on the new restaurant. She answers with an emphatic yes, saying the naming process was “crazy-making”: “I went round and round. Part of me wanted to name it something more anonymous, which felt safer,” she says. “But there was this other part where I’d gone through so many hard years in court fighting to get my name back, and I think it was my mom who said, ‘You worked so hard to get it back, use it.’ So I went with chloe., for better or worse. We’ll see what happens.”
She did a small friends and family investment round to raise the money she needed to open chloe., but is quick to point out that she’s the majority owner this time around. “I love that when I’m troubleshooting decisions with the team and someone has a good idea, I get to say ‘yes,’ not ‘let me take that to someone,’” she says.
Tom Colicchio’s company Crafted Hospitality helped negotiate the real estate deal for chloe., and is handling the backend (HR, accounting, etc). The celebrity chef (and longtime Top Chef judge) and Coscarelli struck up a partnership in 2017 when she reached out to him after reading his open letter to male chefs at the height of the #MeToo movement. They have since hosted three pop-ups together, called Supernatural. When we speak, I tell Colicchio that I’m surprised Coscarelli wasn’t leery of entering a partnership with another hospitality group, but he says he was crystal clear about where the lines were drawn. “I said, ‘It’s your business, you’re going to run it,’” he says. “It’s not that we want anything. We just want to help her out however we can. We want to see her succeed.”
At a preview event held a few days before the chloe. opening, I meet several members of Coscarelli’s team who rattle off the number of years they’ve worked with her: nine, 10, and 14, respectively. Many people both in the front and back of house have returned; even the dishwasher from the original By Chloe is back. “Chloe’s the type of person who’s going to call you a decade later and say, ‘Hey I’m doing something new. I want to give you the first opportunity to come back,” says Alyssa Fasciano, the operations manager at chloe., who also worked at the original By Chloe.
Fasciano tells me about the day when Coscarelli called and said, “I got the keys!” to the new/old space. “I hadn’t been in eight years, so I’m thinking, what’s it going to be like? Is it going to feel like ours? Do I bring sage?” she says. “But I came in the door and instantly felt positive. It felt like it was hers. Like it was her home.”
Sitting inside her namesake restaurant wearing a pale pink chef’s coat and her trademark braid, Coscarelli is a recognizable figure. A couple of times during our chat she gets interrupted by customers who are eager to welcome her back. Another woman says she’s a first-timer—she and her friend were walking by and just had to stop in. “I couldn’t stop eating this,” the woman says, gesturing to the remnants of a quinoa taco bowl. “It’s scary how good it is.”
“Everyone who comes in here has a story for me,” Coscarelli says. “It’s been more emotional for some customers than it’s been for me.” One customer shared that they had come because it was the last meal they had had before saying goodbye to a parent; they had returned on their birthday. “We hugged,” Coscarelli notes, adding, “We have the best customers. The welcome has been very warm.”
A lot of customers want to know what’s next. When are you opening in Boston? What about San Francisco? “I’m just so tired right now. When I see those questions, I’m like, oh my gosh, I really just need a one hour nap,” Coscarelli says. She still wants to reach as many people as she can, but “this time around, it’s more important than ever for me to focus on maintaining the values of the business and the quality. That was probably the biggest lesson I learned from what I experienced with By Chloe. Watching it from afar, in my kicked-out position, it was clear that business doesn’t work when you compromise core values in a trade off to scale. So I will never go down that path, but if there’s a way to reach a lot of people while keeping those values, that would be wonderful.”
For now, she says she’ll be planted here at this location six days a week (she decided to close on Mondays to give her team a day of rest). “This is my baby,” she says, pausing to take in the space before her—her mom taking orders behind the register, the happy customers chowing down on her creations. “It feels more personal than ever because of the journey to get here. That is another reason I wanted to put my name on it. I want people to know that there is a person behind it—that this is mine.”
