Teriyaki is a Japanese cooking method — “teri” meaning gleam, “yaki” meaning grilled or broiled — and it is usually built around fish or meat. So a teriyaki chain is not the obvious place to look for plant-based food. Teriyaki Madness, though, publishes something most chains do not: an allergen chart with its own explicit Vegan column.
Vegan Options at Teriyaki Madness
Answer: Teriyaki Madness marks thirteen items ✓ Vegan on its own chart — and the tofu bowls are not among them. This page previously said the opposite, and it was wrong in both directions: it promoted a brand-designated vegetarian item to vegan, and it left out every item the brand actually designates vegan.
Everything below is read from the brand’s own Allergen Summaries PDF, the only allergen document linked from teriyakimadness.com/nutritionals (Teriyaki-Madness-Allergen-Summaries-2025-07-24.pdf, dated 24 July 2025 in both its filename and its server timestamp), checked on 31 July 2026. It is the best-documented brand we have looked at in this batch.
What the chart actually contains
Twelve columns, in the brand’s order: Eggs · Fish · Gluten · Milk · MSG · Peanuts · Shellfish · Soy · Sesame · Treenuts · Vegetarian · Vegan, across 30 items. Both a graphic chart and a plain-text accessible table of the same data are published, and they agree.
Crucially, Vegetarian and Vegan are separate columns, and Teriyaki Madness uses them differently. A tick under Vegetarian is not a tick under Vegan. The chart also uses a third mark — a question mark — with the brand’s own footnote: “By Request – Some items can be prepared vegan or gluten free by request.”
The thirteen items Teriyaki Madness marks ✓ Vegan
These carry the brand’s own solid vegan mark. The old version of this page named exactly one of them.
- White Rice
- Brown Rice
- Noodles (declares Gluten and Soy)
- Stir-Fry Veggies (declares Soy; Gluten marked “? May Contain Gluten, Check With Store”)
- Steamed Veggies
- Edamame (declares Soy)
- Teriyaki Glaze
- Teriyaki Sauce
- Spicy Sauce
- Mad Sauce
- Stir-Fry Sauce
- Gyoza Sauce
- Soy Sauce
Sixteen items carry a ✓ Vegetarian mark — the thirteen above plus Tofu Teriyaki, Spicy Tofu and Fried Rice. That gap of three is the whole story of this page.
One qualifier, from the brand: several of these sauces carry “? May Contain Gluten, Check With Store” in the Gluten column. That has no bearing on vegan status, but it does show that the chart is not unconditional — some marks depend on the store.
The tofu bowls are marked Vegetarian, not Vegan
This is the correction that matters most.
TOFU TERIYAKI and SPICY TOFU both carry, on Teriyaki Madness’s own chart:
- Vegetarian: ✓
- Vegan: “? Can Be Vegan (By Request)”
That is a question mark, not a tick. The brand is saying the standard preparation is vegetarian and that it can be made vegan if you ask — which is a different thing from being vegan as served. The previous version of this page presented Tofu Teriyaki as one of only two vegan dishes on the menu. On the brand’s own data, it is not vegan as it comes.
Teriyaki Madness does not say what makes the standard preparation non-vegan, and we are not going to invent a reason. The allergen columns give no clue — neither bowl declares Egg, Milk, Fish or Shellfish. The obvious candidate is the frying step, since the brand’s own description reads “Our hand-cut tofu is fried then stir-fried in our highly addictive spicy sauce”, and the same kitchen fries Chicken Katsu, Chicken Eggrolls, Crab Rangoon and Shrimp Tempura. But that is a guess, not a published fact. The right move is to ask two things at the counter: what “by request” actually changes, and what the tofu is fried in.
Fried Rice contains egg — and the old page never said so
Fried Rice was offered as a bowl base throughout the previous version of this article, in every nutrition table, with no flag on it at all.
Teriyaki Madness declares Contains Eggs on Fried Rice. Its Vegetarian mark is a ✓ and its Vegan mark is “? Can Be Vegan (By Request)” — the same status as the tofu. If you are ordering a bowl, White Rice, Brown Rice and Noodles are the three bases the brand marks ✓ Vegan outright.
The sauces to watch
- Katsu Sauce is the one item on the whole chart whose status the brand says varies by location. It is marked “? May be Vegetarian – See Store” and “? May Be Vegan – See Store”, with Fish marked “? May Contain Fish – See Local Store”. Teriyaki Madness’s footnote explains why: “Katsu Sauce – In some Teriyaki Madness locations, Katsu Sauce does not contain Oyster Sauce. Please check with your local Teriyaki Madness.”
- Yum Yum Sauce declares Eggs.
- Orange Sauce carries no Vegetarian mark and no Vegan mark at all — it is simply unmarked, which is not the same as being marked clear.
None of the three appeared in the previous version of this page, and all three are live traps for someone ordering a tofu bowl.
What Teriyaki Madness says about its own data
Two statements from the brand that belong on this page and were missing:
“In preparing results displayed in our Allergen Menu and other nutritional disclosures, we have relied on information provided to us by third party food suppliers. Accordingly, we can make no guarantees regarding the allergen content of these items. All Teriyaki Madness menu items are prepared on shared equipment and cross-contact with any allergens you wish avoid may occur during preparation.”
And a store-level exception the brand publishes precisely: gluten-free sauces are not available at five named Las Vegas addresses. The previous version of this page said vaguely that “different stores may have different preparation styles”; the brand names exactly what varies, so there is no need to be vague about it.
One thing we could not resolve
The plain, non-spicy Tofu Teriyaki appears on the July 2025 allergen chart and in the brand’s nutrition summaries — but the national menu page currently lists only Spicy Tofu Teriyaki, and the URL for the plain version returns a 404. We do not know whether it has been dropped nationally or is simply not listed. Check a location menu rather than assuming either way.
Corrections made to this page
Our methodology commits us to saying where we were wrong rather than quietly editing it out. On this page:
- “There are two vegan teriyaki dishes served in Teriyaki Madness. These are Tofu Teriyaki and Stir Fry Veggies.” — contradicted by the brand’s own chart. Tofu Teriyaki is marked Vegetarian with Vegan as “? Can Be Vegan (By Request)”. Stir-Fry Veggies is correctly marked ✓ Vegan, and was the old page’s one right call.
- “The restaurant only offers two vegan options” / “You Only Have Two Options” — the chart marks thirteen items ✓ Vegan. The twelve the old page missed are now listed above.
- Fried Rice was presented as a neutral bowl base in all six nutrition tables and never flagged. Teriyaki Madness declares Eggs on it.
- The six large nutrition tables have been removed in full. They were transcribed from the brand’s nutrition summaries with errors serious enough that correcting them in place was not the right fix. They reported cholesterol in grams where the source says milligrams — six times over, a thousand-fold error each. They reported “2226 calories from fat” for a 514-calorie item, where the source says 226. They gave the Regular Tofu bowl as 236 calories in one place and 263 in another, on the same page; the source says 263. And every “Stir-fried Veggies” column in the Regular and Large tables — 145 cal at 8 oz, 181 cal at 10 oz — does not exist at any serving size in the brand’s published summaries. Rather than keep numbers that cannot be traced, we have deleted them. The tofu bowl calorie figures that were correct — 144 Junior, 263 Regular, 465 Large, without a base — are stated here in prose instead.
- “A serving has 109, 145, and 181 calories for the Junior, Regular, and Large” (stir-fry veggies) — only the 109 exists in the current source. Removed.
- Steamed Veggies was named as a vegan option in the conclusion with no data behind it. The brand does mark it ✓ Vegan; it is now in the list above.
- Katsu Sauce, Yum Yum Sauce and Orange Sauce were never mentioned. All three are now covered.
- Cross-contamination was never mentioned, despite the brand publishing a quotable shared-equipment statement.
- “Teriyaki is typically made using fish or meat, soy sauce, brown sugar, garlic, ginger, honey, and mirin” — general food writing rather than anything Teriyaki Madness publishes, and it sits awkwardly against the brand’s own Teriyaki Sauce being marked ✓ Vegan. Trimmed.
- “There are vegan restaurants that offer plant-based teriyaki dishes… Teriyaki Madness is one of them” — it is not a vegan restaurant. Removed, along with an outbound link to a third-party listicle of Asian restaurants, which is not a brand source.
- A year-stamped filler paragraph speculating about future bowl sizes has been deleted; it asserted nothing sourceable.
To sum it up
Teriyaki Madness publishes better dietary data than most chains its size, and read correctly it says something more useful than “two options”: rice, noodles, stir-fry and steamed veggies, edamame and seven sauces carry the brand’s own vegan mark, which is enough to build a bowl. What it does not support is the tofu — the item everyone assumes is the vegan one — because the brand marks it vegetarian and puts a question mark under Vegan.
Ask what “by request” changes on the tofu, ask about the fryer, and check Katsu Sauce at your specific store. The brand has told you those three are the variables; it has been unusually clear about the rest.
