Tabay Atkins is set to open Bozeman’s only vegan eatery, but converting carnivores isn’t his goal. “I’m mostly catering to non-vegans,” Atkins said. “I want to give them options they can choose over a meat-based meal. Most of the time, they enjoy it more than the meat base original, and they come back as regulars.
” Tabay’s Mindful Kitchen opens July 1 in the parking lot of Pure Dispensary at 7th Avenue and Mendenhall. The food truck is fully vegan and National Park-themed, with comfort classics and fast food favorites all given National Park-inspired names. While the truck has no official partnership or affiliation with the National Park Service, it offers an immersive experience, including a custom Tabay’s Mindful Kitchen stamp for customers’ National Parks passports and oval park-style stickers for purchase.
“Coming to the truck should feel like coming to your favorite National Park,” Atkins said. Before moving to Bozeman at the end of last year, Atkins lived in and operated his food truck out of Southern California and then Hawaii. There, he recalled several head-turning moments from customers happily eating his burgers and sandwiches without realizing that they weren’t eating meat.
It’s not the first time the 21-year-old chef has turned heads. ‘Help people heal’ Before finishing elementary school, Atkins became the world’s youngest certified yoga teacher. The same path that led him to yoga, and later veganism, started with his mother’s diagnosis of Stage 3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
She was diagnosed when Atkins was 6 years old, and already had two softball-sized tumors on her neck. The recovery, Atkins said, was nearly as grueling. “She had to do very intensive chemotherapy, which broke her down physically and emotionally to the point where she couldn’t even walk on her own,” Atkins said.
” Before her recovery, the tumors had made it impossible for her to eat, drink, breathe or speak comfortably. After undergoing chemotherapy and beating cancer in 2012, she couldn’t walk. At that time, yoga wasn’t part of mainstream wellness culture like it is today. But Atkins’ mother, Sahel Anvarinejad, decided to give the practice a try anyway and found it to be the most effective treatment for the lingering effects of cancer and recovery.
She eventually completed her own yoga teacher training, with then-7-year-old Atkins by her side. Just a few months into her training, Atkins said he noticed his mother not only walking on her own again, but happier and healthier than she’d even been before cancer. “I didn’t think he was paying attention during my training,” Anvarinejad said.
“ When Atkins told his mother his dreams of also becoming a yoga teacher, she thought he was sharing what he wanted to be when he grew up. Turns out, he wanted to start right away. “I was really inspired by how much it helped her heal,” Atkins said. ” At 10 years old, he completed his own 200-hour yoga teacher certification with an instructor who did not cutting him any slack based on his age.
” Atkins said. ” Atkins’ father, retired NFL linebacker Larry Atkins, said he and his wife always knew their son was advanced. But when he finished his certification, they didn’t know he had just become the youngest yoga teacher in the world until reporters started reaching out.
“It was all of a sudden,” Anvarinejad said. “Thousands of emails from everywhere around the world, wanting him to come be on their TV shows or to teach at their events. ” To seize the new wave of opportunities, Atkins withdrew from public school and enrolled in homeschool where he completed online coursework.
When his appearances began earning money, Anvarinejad expected him to buy the toys and treats every 10 year old dreams of. Instead, Atkins chose to donate it to cancer research. “I asked him, ‘Well, what are you gonna do with the money you are making? ’ He was like, ‘No, all of this is to help people with cancer,’” Anvarinejad said.
” ‘A progression’ Being immersed in the world of yoga, Atkins said, made exposure to veganism almost inevitable, since the two share a core value: Do no harm. “It was on my radar,” Atkins said. “Eventually I said, ‘You know what, I’ll go vegan. But not right now. ’” That vague future time came up sooner than expected.
At 12 years old, Atkins watched the 2017 documentary, “What the Health,” which argues that eating meat, eggs and dairy significantly raises the risk of cancer and other chronic diseases. Still impacted by his mother’s cancer journey, Atkins skipped asking permission and simply informed his parents he’d decided to go vegan. “I was nervous,” Anvarinejad said.
“The main holdback for us was family and society saying if you’re vegan, you’re going to miss out on your nutrition. ” As a Cordon Bleu-trained chef, Anvarinejad took it on as a challenge, inspired to make vegan food just as good as the nostalgic meals from her own childhood. “You’re more creative,” Anvarinejad said.
“I remember I made fried chicken from mushrooms. ” After graduating high school at 14, Atkins earned a certification from Cornell University in plant-based nutrition. Before launching the food truck, he began offering nutrition services and meal deliveries tailored to clients’ individual health needs.
When he launched his food truck two years later, Atkins’ goals had shifted. His menu is 100% vegan, but that doesn’t mean it’s health food. By serving dishes indistinguishable from their meat-based inspirations, Atkins isn’t trying to sway people into a fully plant-based diet. But every vegan meal a customer buys from him, he said, is one less meat-based meal they’re getting elsewhere.
“I don’t say to someone who’s not vegan that they should change overnight to whole food plant-based, no oil, no sugar, nothing processed. A big switch like that can be scary, and I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone,” Atkins said. “I think it should be a progression. ” ‘T-shirt effect’ Atkins and Anvarinejad carried the values of yoga and veganism into how they ran the food truck itself.
The busiest days of the year were Thanksgiving and Christmas, when they stayed open all day and offered a special menu of holiday classics. “It was pay-what-you-can,” Atkins said. ” They’re also loose about hours of operation. , the two said they always stayed open until there were no customers left to feed, something Anvarinejad attributed to her Persian culture.
“We would be up until 11 o’clock or midnight sometimes. Just people coming through, and if we hadn’t finished cleaning up yet we’d still make them something,” Anvarinejad said. ” More than a decade after beating cancer, the family faced another shocking upheaval in 2025. Atkins had recently moved out of his parents’ house for the first time to attend Arizona State University while Anvarinejad was still in Hawaii running the food truck.
One night in February, she was cleaning up and getting ready to close when a young couple came to the window to order soft serve. The ice cream machine, she said, takes an hour to set up and is the one exception to the truck’s loose closing hours. “I would never make ice cream at nine o’clock at night.
, I won’t do it until the next morning, because it’s such a long process,” Anvarinejad said. m.. “I don’t know what would have happened,” Anvarinejad said. ” It took months before she could talk about it without getting emotional. Before the fire burned their entire home to the ground, the food truck had been her “happy place,” from the cooking to the customers.
Afterward, in the midst of the emotional weight and finding a new place to live, that feeling became impossible to reclaim. Atkins left school and moved back to Hawaii to help his mother and take over running the food truck. Six months later, he said, things were starting to feel somewhat normal again, and he, his parents and grandparents headed back to the mainland for his 20th birthday, carrying on a four-year tradition of spending his birthday at a new National Park each year.
“We had never been to Glacier before and heard it’s beautiful,” Atkins said. ” Having visited many other National Parks and worked as an intern at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, Atkins already had his eye on paleontology as a major. During the family’s trip to Glacier, he got to chatting with a park ranger about the subject, who recommended he visit the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman.
After checking out the museum, Atkins returned to the family’s RV, where his grandmother was waiting with a souvenir T-shirt from the gift shop. But the shirt didn’t have the museum’s logo. Instead, it had the mascot for the Montana State Bobcats. “She thought that was the museum’s shirt.
She didn’t know,” Atkins said. “But it was a nice, soft, $25 shirt and it was a kind gift, so I kept it. ” By the end of the trip, Atkins was narrowing down college choices. Still unsure of his academic path, he was looking for a university that offered majors in both business and paleontology.
“I was doing my research and weighing my options, and I said, ‘Well, I have this T-shirt,’” Atkins said. ” He was surprised to find that MSU not only offered majors in his areas of interest, but had one of the best paleontology programs in the country. Now he’s set to start classes there this fall, all thanks to a ripple effect that began with a road trip after the house fire and a souvenir from his grandmother that, at the time, didn’t seem to make sense.
“They’re the very specific minor things that you don’t even think about, but if you changed any of them in the slightest way it would change the whole course of your life,” Atkins said. ” By 21, Atkins has been a yoga teacher, a vegan chef and a food truck owner, none of it the result of a plan he set out to follow. This fall, he’s adding college student to the list, balancing his first year at MSU with a food truck opening July 1, both in a city he found by accident.
