HipCityVeg founder Nicole Marquis steps down as head of the vegan restaurant mini-empire

Nicole Marquis has stepped down as chief executive of the vegan-restaurant group she created 12 years ago with the fast-casual eatery HipCityVeg, which she expanded into the Center City cocktail bar Charlie Was a Sinner and the Latin bistro Bar Bombón.

Marquis, 42, said she would remain an owner of Marquis & Co. and would retain her seat on the board. In ceding the CEO’s role, she leaves day-to-day oversight of the restaurants and its 130 employees to Michelle LaVigne, vice president of operations, and Danielle Minnis, director of human resources. It is not clear when a new CEO will be named.

Marquis said she was happy that the company would continue to be female-run.

“It’s just a good time,” Marquis said Wednesday of her decision. “I have projects I’ve been working on and the company is in a really good place and the team is really stable.”

“Coming through the pandemic and keeping the restaurants alive and thriving, keeping the staff and the team intact, was really a challenge,” she said. “But in that time, I started to recognize other things that customers need in the plant-based world.” She declined to elaborate.

Marquis said she believed that her biggest sources of pride were “helping to make Philadelphia a vegan destination and seeing Philadelphia embrace vegan food. My mission has always been to bring plant-based food to millions of people everywhere, and I wanted to start in my hometown.” She also credited Rich Landau of the Center City destination Vedge and West Chester’s Ground Provisions with spreading the gospel.

Marquis worked for Landau at Horizons, his early vegan cafe in Willow Grove, as did many vegan restaurateurs in the Philadelphia area. She was its dining-room manager before she opened HipCityVeg in spring 2012 on 18th Street near Rittenhouse Square.

Marquis, who grew up in Elkins Park and Ambler, went to Temple University followed by graduate school for performance art at the California Institute of the Arts.

HipCityVeg now has four locations in Philadelphia and one in Washington, D.C. Marquis opened Charlie Was a Sinner in Washington Square West in 2014, naming it after the first sentence of an apocryphal novel to create a naughty vibe befitting the seedy bar it replaced. In 2015, she opened Bar Bombón near Rittenhouse Square, with food and cocktails inspired by her family in Puerto Rico. (The story goes that when she announced in San Juan that she was following a vegan diet, her grandmother exclaimed: “Are you OK? Are you sick?”)

During the early days of pandemic, Marquis was among the more vocal restaurateurs demanding the help of city government as businesses struggled. Marquis was a creator of Save Philly Restaurants, an ad hoc group that represented almost 300 restaurants.

For her immediate next step, “I’m going to come into the restaurants and taste the food and enjoy the atmosphere,” she said. “Twelve years is longer than I think a lot of entrepreneurs spend holding on to their baby. But I’m not going anywhere.”