Souley Vegan opened in Oakland in 2009. Tamearra Dyson has been running it for fifteen years. In that time the restaurant has expanded into ghost kitchens in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and Dyson has become one of the most recognized names in soul-food-tradition vegan cooking in the country.
She beat Bobby with a vegan burger. The vegan burger is the genre's hardest dish — it has to satisfy a person who came in expecting meat without pretending to be meat. Most vegan burgers fail because they are either too convincing (uncanny) or too forgiving (mush).
Dyson's was neither. It had structure, it had crust, it had the umami load that comes from a long-built bean-and-mushroom base that's been refined across thousands of services. Bobby has had vegan options on his menus. He hasn't built a fifteen-year vegan kitchen.