Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants is a full-service restaurant and winery group. Its own Our Story page says, verbatim: “Founded in 2005 by CEO Tim McEnery, Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants is built upon the passionate belief that food and wine hold the power to forge lasting connections.” (Two details this page used to add — that it opened in Orland Park, Illinois, and that it runs “the country’s largest wine club” — return zero matches anywhere on chwinery.com and have been removed.)
Answer: Cooper’s Hawk does not label anything on its web menu as vegan. The leaf icon means Vegetarian, and on the printed menu it means something narrower still — “Vegetarian Upon Request”. Both facts matter, and this page previously got the first one badly wrong.
Correction: the leaf does not mean vegan
This page used to say: “They designate vegan-friendly items on their menu with a little leaf after the name.” That was false, and it was the most dangerous sentence on the page. On the dine-in and carryout menu at chwinery.com (fetched 31 July 2026), every one of those icons carries the accessible label Vegetarian; the printed legend under the menu reads “Vegetarian”; and the page’s structured data uses only schema.org/VegetarianDiet. There are zero occurrences of VeganDiet and zero occurrences of the word “vegan” anywhere on that page.
A reader who took that sentence at face value would have treated a burrata bruschetta, a mozzarella flatbread and a cheese-topped risotto as vegan. All three carry the leaf.
The two things about that leaf you need together
This is the part that is easy to get half-right, so here are both halves.
First: on the web menu, the leaf is currently applied to a shrimp dish and a chicken salad. As of 31 July 2026, shrimp & scallop risotto (BIN 79) and napa chicken (BIN 75) both carry the Vegetarian icon on chwinery.com. Napa chicken carries it in the structured data as well.
Second: on the printed and gluten-free menu, the same two entries carry a qualifier the web menu drops. In Cooper’s Hawk’s own GF menu PDF (created 27 April 2026) they read:
- “napa chicken BIN 75 Vegetarian Upon Request“
- “tortilla soup BIN 92 … Vegetarian Upon Request“
- “sweet corn & tomato risotto BIN 76 Vegan Upon Request“
So the underlying meaning is “this can be made vegetarian — or in one case vegan — if you ask”, and the web menu renders that as a bare leaf glyph with no “upon request” text anywhere near the item. Neither statement is complete without the other: the marker is not the error it looks like, and it is also not something you can read off the web menu safely.
Note also that the word “vegan” does appear once in Cooper’s Hawk’s published material — on that GF menu, against the sweet corn & tomato risotto. It is the only occurrence across all six HTML menu pages and both PDFs, and it is a conditional, not a label.
One more inconsistency worth knowing: the dine-in page shows 15 items with the visible leaf icon but only 5 with a diet marker in its structured data. Shrimp & scallop risotto has the icon and no structured marker. Anyone verifying by machine alone would have missed it.
Corroboration that Cooper’s Hawk does not itself class those two dishes as vegetarian: in its allergen guide, the VEGETARIAN ENTRÉES section lists only Gnocchi with Roasted Butternut Squash and Sweet Corn & Tomato Risotto. Napa Chicken is filed under SALADS and Shrimp & Scallop under RISOTTO.
Correction: the allergen guide is online
This page previously implied the allergen data was unavailable. It is not. The menu footer says “Please inform your server of any food allergies. An allergen guide is available upon request or at chwinery.com/menus“, and the guide is published there as a PDF, created 28 April 2026.
It is a dot grid across eleven columns — Dairy, Egg, Soy, Tree Nut, Peanut, Fish, Shellfish, Wheat, Sesame, Garlic, MSG — with this preamble, verbatim:
“The Cooper’s Hawk Kitchen has many shared components, including preparation areas, utensils, and cooking equipment. While we take precautions to prevent cross-contact with allergens, the possibility exists and we cannot guarantee that any food item is allergen-free. The dots indicate when an allergen is present in a dish. Items designated with an asterisk (*) either are cooked or have an ingredient that is cooked in a fryer, making them potentially subject to cross-contact with the allergens listed below, excluding tree nuts and peanuts.”
That grid answers most of what the old version of this page was guessing at. It also has a hard limit: there is no column for meat, stock, gelatin or honey. Cooper’s Hawk’s own guide gives Candied Bacon a single dot — Garlic — and nothing else. A row with no Dairy dot is not a vegan row.
The side dishes, as Cooper’s Hawk declares them
The old version of this page told readers to order six sides “without butter”. Cooper’s Hawk’s own allergen guide says most of them contain dairy and egg, which “without butter” does not address. Every cell below was read with coordinate-aware extraction from the PDF and then confirmed against a rendered image of the page.
- Oven-Roasted Vegetables — Dairy, Garlic
- Asparagus — Dairy, Egg, Garlic
- Grilled Broccoli — Dairy, Egg, Garlic
- Roasted Broccolini — Dairy, Egg, Garlic
- Garlic Green Beans — Dairy, Egg, Garlic
- Garlic Spinach — Dairy, Garlic
- Wasabi-Buttered Mashed Potatoes — Dairy
- Mary’s Potatoes — Dairy
- Betty’s Potatoes — Dairy, Soy, Wheat, MSG
- Asian Slaw* — Egg, Soy, Wheat, Sesame, Garlic, MSG (asterisk: fryer cross-contact)
- Side Salad — Dairy, Egg, Garlic
- Fingerling Potato & French Onion Gratin — Dairy, Egg, Soy, Garlic, MSG
- Pretzel Bread — Dairy, Soy, Wheat
- French Fries & Ketchup* — Soy, Garlic. No Dairy or Egg declared, but the asterisk means fryer cross-contact with dairy, egg, gluten, soy, fish and garlic.
- Fruit — no dots in any column.
- Candied Bacon — Garlic only. See the warning above.
The two sides with no declared dairy or egg are Fruit and French Fries & Ketchup, and the fries carry the fryer asterisk. Everything the old page recommended “without butter” — oven-roasted vegetables, asparagus, grilled broccoli, the wasabi-buttered mash — carries a dairy dot, and two of them carry egg as well. Cooper’s Hawk does not publish what, if anything, can be removed.
Salad dressings
Every dressing except one declares dairy, egg or fish:
- Balsamic Vinaigrette — Garlic only. The only dressing on the guide with no dairy, egg or fish dot.
- Honey Mustard Vinaigrette — Egg, Garlic (and honey, which no allergen column can show)
- House Italian — Dairy, Egg, Garlic
- Ranch — Dairy, Egg, Soy, Garlic, MSG
- BBQ Ranch — Dairy, Egg, Soy, Garlic, MSG
- Bleu Cheese — Dairy, Egg, Fish, Garlic
- Caesar Pesto — Dairy, Egg, Fish, Garlic
- Sesame Ginger — Egg, Soy, Sesame, Garlic, MSG
The dishes this page used to recommend
- Sweet Corn & Tomato Risotto — the old page said to “request that the Stracciatella be removed”. Cooper’s Hawk’s allergen guide gives the dish Dairy and Garlic, and the GF menu marks it “Vegan Upon Request”, which is the strongest thing Cooper’s Hawk says about any dish on its menu. Those two facts sit together: the standard dish contains dairy, and the kitchen states it can make a vegan version if asked. What that version contains is not published.
- Napa Chicken salad — the old page suggested “removing the chicken bits… dismissing the goat cheese and replacing the honey mustard vinaigrette”. That recommendation has been removed. It asks a reader to strip a chicken salad down to something Cooper’s Hawk does not publish. The guide gives the dish Dairy, Egg, Tree Nut and Garlic.
- Shaved Brussels Sprouts Salad and Roasted Vegetable & Goat Cheese Flatbread — neither is on any current Cooper’s Hawk menu. The old page also called the goat-cheese flatbread “labeled a vegan favorite”; no such label exists, and never did. Both entries are removed. The current brussels sprouts dish is a different appetiser, “Cashews, Mint, Cilantro, Sweet Thai Chili, Sesame-Sriracha Aioli”, and it is not marked vegetarian.
- Plain Ol’ House Salad — Dairy, Soy, Wheat, Garlic on the guide. It is not marked vegetarian on the menu.
- Classic Tomato Bruschetta and Caprese Flatbread — both marked vegetarian, both Dairy, Wheat, Garlic. Burrata and mozzarella respectively.
Drinks
- Cooper’s Hawk Bloody Mary — the old page said it “contains jumbo shrimp and andouille”. It contains more than that. Verbatim from the menu: “Tito’s Handmade Vodka, Skewer of Aged Cheddar, Andouille, Jumbo Shrimp, Bleu Cheese-Stuffed Olive, Grape Tomato, Pickle, Tajín Rim; Sidecar of Local Craft Beer.”
- Martinis — the old page said the Espresso and Dark Chocolate martinis “both contain Baileys Irish Cream”. Half of that is wrong. Dark Chocolate is published as “Grey Goose, Dark Chocolate Liqueur, Baileys Irish Cream, Whipped Cream”. Espresso Classico is published as “Absolut Vanilia, Caffè Borghetti, Cold Brew” — no Baileys. The page also missed “dirty nasty”, which is served with bleu cheese olives.
- Wine — this page used to state that “Cooper’s Hawk maintains that all of its wines are vegan-friendly” and that they avoid egg- and casein-based fining agents. That claim has been removed. The words “vegan”, “fining” and “isinglass” return zero matches across chwinery.com’s homepage, all menu pages, Our Story, Contact, the wine catalog and the tasting room page. Cooper’s Hawk makes no such statement anywhere we can find. If the wine matters to you, that is a question for the winery directly.
- Limoncello — roughly 200 words about Cooper’s Hawk Limoncello and shellac-coated lemons have been removed. The word “limoncello” returns zero matches across every Cooper’s Hawk page fetched; it is not on any published menu, and the conclusion drawn about it had no source.
Other removals
- A happy-hour section giving specific times, a list of eight states and a free gluten-free pretzel bread. No happy-hour page appears in Cooper’s Hawk’s own sitemap and none of those details could be sourced.
- Every bin number previously attached to a dish. They are wine-pairing suggestions that change, and none in the old text matched the current menu (which prints a bin number in each item block).
- A closing list of five unrelated restaurants with menu specifics for each. None of it was sourced, and it is not what a reader searching for Cooper’s Hawk came here for.
- The claim that “all the burgers, entrees, soups, sandwiches, and pasta are non-vegan, as they contain meats from animals.” The conclusion is right for most of the menu but the reason is wrong: the gnocchi and the sweet corn risotto contain no meat. They contain cheese.
Where that leaves you
Cooper’s Hawk publishes a genuine, current allergen guide, and it is worth reading before you go. What it does not publish is any vegan designation, any ingredient statement, or any description of what a dish becomes when the kitchen makes it “upon request”. The realistic order is a plate of sides, and the guide says most of those contain dairy.
The one thing Cooper’s Hawk itself puts in writing is the risotto: “sweet corn & tomato risotto — Vegan Upon Request”. If you go, that is the item to ask about, and the specific questions are what the vegan version substitutes for the stracciatella, and what the risotto base is cooked in — neither of which is published. Its sibling dish, shrimp & scallop risotto, lists Parmesan in the same base.
Sources
All fetched 31 July 2026: chwinery.com/menus/dine-in-carryout and the other five menu pages; Food Allergens & Sensitivities Guide (created 28 April 2026); Main GF menu PDF (created 27 April 2026); chwinery.com/about/our-story. No vegan blog, listicle or aggregator was used.
