Boise not ‘ready’ for this restaurant, it closed. ‘I should’ve moved to a bigger city’
Less than a year after two new vegan restaurants sprouted up in downtown Boise, the bloom is off.
Frondescence, 103 N. 10th St., has permanently closed. That follows the demise of Alchemist Plant Pub, which lasted five months at 620 W. Idaho St. before shuttering in August.
“I should’ve moved to a bigger city to do this like San Diego or Portland,” Frondescence owner Justin Arroues wrote in an Instagram reply last month. “Boise just isn’t ready for what I have to offer.”
The changes mean there’s only one purely vegan restaurant left downtown: High Note Cafe, 225 N. 5th St., which shifted to a meatless model in 2019. Alchemist has since reopened as a coffee destination.
Launched in February, Frondescence was a brick-and-mortar evolution from The Void, a now-defunct vegan food truck. Attempts to reach Arroues for comment were unsuccessful, but his candid words on social media paint a picture of a small, specialized business that struggled to find a consistent Idaho following.
When Frondescence debuted, Arroues aspired to feed daytime and late-night customers — operating into the wee hours. But at the start of September, Arroues posted on Instagram that Frondescence had dropped late-night service and laid off all employees, leaving him to run the restaurant alone.
In replies to comments a week or two later, Arroues confirmed that Frondescence had closed. The restaurant needed three times as much business, he explained, “and it just wasn’t happening. Huge bummer.”
“Barely anyone showed up,” he shared in another reply.
The majority of people who walked into Frondescence were out-of-towners searching for vegan food, Arroues wrote.
“Boise never did that. It’s so weird, but it’s the reality.”
