(Mild spoilers for Netflix’s Bad Vegan will be found below.)
Bad Vegan brings the story of Sarma Melngailis, who enjoyed a wildly popular run (for about a decade) as a celebrity restauranteur, to life on Netflix. Is it a true story? In so much that it’s supported by law enforcement accounts, reporting at the time, and reactions from those who knew (and some who still know) Sarma, it’s supposed to be true. The limited series (from executive producer Chris Smith of Tiger King and Fyre: The Greatest Party) follows several points of view but feels as objective as possible while taking viewers on a ride that feels entirely unbelievable.
The show follows on the heels of other streaming stories about grifters, including Amanda Seyfried as Theranos’ white-collar fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout and Julia Garner’s take on the indelible Anna Delvey in Inventing Anna. With Bad Vegan, viewers will initially wonder how Sarma fell so far from grace, after fighting her way to the top of the competitive NYC restaurant pile, and over four episodes, those details unfold.
Sarma is the founder of One Lucky Duck and Pure Food and Wine, two very popular raw vegan eateries that celebrities (including Alec Baldwin) loved to frequent. By 2016, her life was in a shambles, and the New York Post called out the “downfall of NYC’s hottest vegan” while after she earned the attorney-dubbed nickname of “the vegan Bernie Madoff.” She was so named for stiffing her employees out of a month’s pay, not once but twice, and the story wasn’t all her own.
Rather, Salma (who did, in fact, make a ton of wrong moves, no excuses there) had gotten involved with a terrible person, Anthony Strangis (who used the pseudonym of “Shane Fox”). He worked his way into her life, and although she seemed very unenthused, she married him, and before long, they were on the lam, hopping from casino to casino while she fed his compulsive gambling with money from her business. That, of course, cheated employees out of paychecks, and investors were none too happy, either. In the end, Sarma served 4 months at Rikers Island with Anthony doing time as well. She appears to have fallen into a cult-like mentality with him over promises of dog immortality and more, and the series often feels stranger than truth, but purportedly, it matches as closely to the facts as possible.
Bad Vegan will stream on March 16.
