Is beloved Seattle restaurant Bamboo Garden serving animal products to its vegan customers?

SEATTLE, Washington, April 23, 2016 -- Despite what their website, waitstaff, and lobby signage proudly proclaim--that everything on the menu except the fortune cookies is vegan--local "vegan" restaurant Bamboo Garden has likely been serving up eggs and dairy.

Something tasted "off."

"We ordered the skewers and the 'bacon' looked exactly like the non-vegan Morning Star Farms brand, so we were skeptical," says a local vegan woman, Sally Smith (not her real name).

"When we asked at the time, they wouldn't show us the package, brand, or ingredients, but assured us it was vegan. That's when we became suspicious."

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Step 1: Dumpster diving.

Like any good vegan, Smith figured the first step was to grab a friend and investigate the restaurant's dumpsters after hours to see what they could find.

First, they confirmed that Bamboo Garden is the only restaurant using that dumpster (it is):

When they donned gloves and looked inside, they found several commercial-quantity packages and took photos. Almost every label reflected non-vegan ingredients such as egg whites, whey, milk, and honey:

The friends also found eggshells in the dumpster:

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Step 2: Laboratory testing.

"It all looked pretty damning," Smith said. "But I really didn't want it to be true."

At this point, Smith admits, she was getting overwhelmed by the information. She decided to start a conversation online with several friends for input and it became a collective endeavor. "I needed some help parsing everything," she said.

The friends had heard a rumor that Bamboo Garden employees sometimes cooked non-vegan shift meals and wanted to verify whether or not that was the reason for their dumpster findings. "The packaging certainly seemed commercial-sized, but there were actually only a few eggshells." That's when someone suggested they order some take-out and deliver it to a local laboratory for testing:

"The skewers we had eaten were part of the take-out order we submitted for testing," Smith said. "It tested positive, just as we suspected it would."

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Step 3: Interpreting the test results.

Smith and crew turned to Sergio Sanchez, a scientist at IEH Laboratories, to interpret the results. Some of the results are presented as ">" (greater than) because the tests were set at a fine resolution looking for any trace amounts of the allergens, Sanchez explained. Due to the sensitivity of the tests, they become overloaded when a reasonably large amount of the allergen is present. There is no upper limit on the potential amount of the allergen present in the results that are presented as ">," but this level, Sanchez feels, it is extremely unlikely to be caused by cross contamination. In other words, according to Sanchez, it is a somewhat safe assumption that the results that are presented with a ">" actually have the allergen--in this case, eggs and dairy--as an ingredient. He elaborated that the 8.9 for the chicken could possibly be from cross contamination and the 2.1 and the 3.3 have a higher possibility to be from cross contamination. An egg is about 13% protein, Sanchez said, so one would have to extrapolate up from the given PPM (parts per million) of the egg allergen PPM to derive a PPM of "egg" as a whole.

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Step 3: More dumpster diving.

Smith wanted to make sure that what they found in the dumpster that night wasn't a fluke, so she went back. Unfortunately, what she found was more of the same, "plus a bunch of compost and recycling that really should have been sorted out," she noted.

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Step 4: What do the owners say?

The group wanted to take the information they had to the owners and hear their perspective. "We knew they had been advertising themselves as vegan and seemed to align themselves with animal rights, as their website, Yelp page, and lobby show," said Smith:

Smith called the restaurant, but the person on the other end of the phone said no owner or manager was present so they'd have to leave a message. "Are you with the press?" the server asked suspiciously. Smith explained that she was not and left a message.

When she hadn't heard back in a week, she decided to grab a friend and stop by in person. She had heard of other folks being given reassuring tours through the kitchen--which is also certified kosher--and was hoping she could get a tour, too.

"They said we absolutely could not go back in the kitchen. They said no managers were present and the owners don't speak English." Smith pressed about the faux meats and asked whether or not everything was vegan. "They said it wasn't, but when we pressed about which things were and which weren't, they would not elaborate," she said. "And they really didn't seem to care. We asked to see packaging and read labels and they refused."

You can listen to the entire recorded conversation here.

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Step 5: Going Public

"We're not on a vengeance quest," Smith said. "We don't want to hurt anyone and we don't want to ruin a family business. Some of us are business owners ourselves. But people have a right to know what they're putting in their bodies. Informed consent and all that."

Smith said that she and her vegan friends had been eating at Bamboo Garden for more than 15 years--the waitstaff knew them by name and had seen her friends' kids grow up there. "These are people we trusted."

The group took the story first to The Stranger, but after a week and a half the story stalled. They decided to take the matter into their own hands.

"We really felt like there could be more investigation to get to the bottom of everything, but we kind of ran out of time and money." Smith said she couldn't bear the thought of more vegan friends going there without knowing what they were really eating. So they decided to ask a buddy to write up the story and make it public. That way, folks could read the whole tale and decide for themselves.

"At the very least," Smith said, "people should know there's a pretty good chance that they've been eating animal products at Bamboo Garden. We know this can have ethical and/or medical consequences for people. We desperately want to believe it's not true, but the evidence is making it pretty tough."