Inside Mother Other, fern green-and-white walls anchor a room filled with plants and personal treasures. A tiny bar peeks out from behind curtains, while a colorful gallery wall holds framed images of produce, flowers and other things chef Alexi Mandolini and beverage director Taylor Herbert genuinely love.
The effect is warm and collected, like the home of a dear friend or relative. While Mother Other opened in Denver’s Baker neighborhood this past June, it already feels lived in.
That impression is fitting as the restaurant was built, in part, by the community it now welcomes.
Rather than take on a massive bank loan or hire an interior designer, Herbert and Mandolini opted to complete much of the buildout themselves. But before long, friends, customers and neighbors began arriving to help. “People literally just showed up with tools,” Herbert says.
A former client—who also happens to be a busy doctor—helped install beadboard, while a regular who works as a lighting designer offered advice about warm bulbs. Other friends painted, ran cables and lent their construction skills.
Looking around the dining room now, Herbert says she and Mandolini could never have created it alone.
“This space would not exist without the people who showed up to help us build it,” she says. Those friends and longtime customers can walk in today and “feel like they’re a part of this because they are.”
The restaurant is the permanent realization of six years of pop-ups and farmers’ markets for Herbert and Mandolini, the partners in life and business behind The Easy Vegan. The two met in 2018, when Mandolini moved to Denver from Chicago and Herbert served her first beer in town at Asbury Provisions. The business later gained a national audience when their team won Season 16 of Food Network’s “The Great Food Truck Race.”
Mother Other gives the couple—and the people who followed their roaming operation—a place to stay awhile. Herbert becomes emotional describing longtime supporters entering an air-conditioned dining room and eating from real plates instead of standing outside with takeout containers. The fixed address also frees the owners from constantly telling customers where The Easy Vegan will appear next.
The name Mother Other honors the women who taught them what hospitality meant long before either worked in the industry.
Herbert grew up watching her mother wait tables, sometimes sitting nearby as she counted her earnings after a shift. Mandolini learned about care through her mother, her grandmother Doree and the many other women who fed her. She remembers going to her best friend’s house after soccer practice, where her friend’s mother would make pastina.
It is a tribute to biological mothers, as well as grandmothers, aunts, neighbors, friends’ parents and chosen family. The “other” embraces the otherness of vegan food, too, without making it the restaurant’s entire identity.
“At Mother Other, we really wanted to honor the women in our lives who taught us hospitality,” says Herbert. “ I still think that it’s very mainstream for men to still be centered in professional working kitchens and women are expected to be in the kitchen at home, so we also just really value the matriarchal leadership aspect.”
Mandolini and Herbert are proudly vegan, but they intentionally left the word out of Mother Other’s name. At farmers’ markets, they watched people see “vegan” on their sign and move along before trying the food. Here, the goal is to make dishes that feel familiar, abundant and complete—not like concessions for diners who would rather be eating meat.
“You can’t argue with me about [whether] a plate of rigatoni is vegan or not,” Mandolini says, “because it’s just a plate of beautiful pasta. We try to showcase the food as it is without trying to add any bells and whistles.”
The exquisite plates coming out of the kitchen are proof Mandolini is fulfilling her mission. Perfectly cooked rigatoni alla vodka arrives with whipped almond ricotta, basil oil and Aleppo pepper crumb. The comforting giarancini—panko-crusted, fried risotto served with house giardiniera—nods to Mandolini’s Chicago roots.
The crave-worthy potato-and-chive pierogi are a favorite from The Easy Vegan, while the Japanese sweet potato layered with miso, black garlic, tempura-fried onion rings and sesame chile oil is a show-stopper. Portions are deliberately generous, countering the idea that eating vegan means leaving hungry.
The menu also carries forward relationships forged at farmers’ markets. Mother Other sources produce from Colorado growers like Switch Gears Farm, while Sfoglina supplies hand-milled pasta. For the owners, sourcing locally is less a marketing claim than a way to celebrate the work of people they know and contribute to Denver’s interconnected food community.
Herbert’s beverage program completes the experience she could not create under a pop-up tent. Drawing on her background in bartending and managing bars and LGBTQ+ nightclubs, she gives cocktails and nonalcoholic drinks equal attention. House-carbonated vegetable sodas and drinks built around seasonal produce echo the kitchen. Her challenge is much like Mandolini’s: to show that a drink without alcohol—or a plate without meat—can still possess its own sense of value.
That care extends to Mother Other’s employees. Most work four full days followed by three days off, a structure intended to reduce restaurant-industry burnout. A whole-house tip pool, cross-training between dining-room and kitchen positions and the absence of service charges support the owners’ idea of “radical hospitality,” that care should reach the people providing it as well as the guests receiving it.
Mandolini hopes it will be known not merely as a great vegan restaurant, but as a great restaurant—one people can visit without waiting for a special occasion. Herbert says she never wants to take for granted that someone with limited money to dine out chose Mother Other among the city’s many eateries.
“ There are so many wonderful restaurants in Denver,” she says. “And if we are the one that—whether you’re vegan or not—you choose to come eat at, that’s huge.”
After years of asking customers to find them, Herbert and Mandolini are finally staying put. Now, beneath a gallery wall filled with things they love, the community that helped build Mother Other has a permanent place at the table.
