Viva Chicken is a great casual dining restaurant in America. As the name suggests, it specializes in charcoal fire rotisserie chicken. The restaurant delivers hot, flavorsome, and delicious chicken in the most wholesome way possible.
Viva Chicken publishes an ingredient description for every dish, which is more than most chains do — and those descriptions show that several items this page used to call vegan are not, and that the rest cannot be confirmed. Viva does not designate a single menu item as vegan.
For some, the options here will appear limited. The primary reason is that this is a restaurant specializing in chicken, so most of what a plant-based eater can look at is sides, salads and bowls. What follows is what Viva actually publishes about each of them.
Read on to learn about the vegan options at Viva Chicken.
What Is Viva Chicken?
Viva Chicken is a popular casual dining restaurant winning customers’ hearts by serving hot, fresh, and delicious chicken. It started as a small shop on the streets of Peru.
It soon gained the attention of the patrons because of its authentic Pollo a la Brasa recipe.
Viva comes with a promise to deliver authentic and unique flavors of streets wrapped in a classy yet casual way. Every dish on the menu is a rollercoaster of flavor and aroma, and it will take your taste buds on a wild ride.
The founders and owners, Chef Bruno Machhiavello and Randy Garcia, strive to make Viva Chicken a Charlotte-based company. It is a company passionate about the food it puts out. It cares about its customers, employees, and the community.
The One Thing To Understand Before You Order
Viva Chicken does two useful things and one unhelpful one.
The useful part: each item on its menu pages carries a short ingredient description, so you can see that the Peruvian Fried Rice contains egg or that the Limena Chopped Salad contains bacon without having to ask. That is genuinely better disclosure than most restaurants in this category offer.
The unhelpful part is the document Viva points you at for anything more detailed. Its “Nutritional & Allergy Guide” is served from a file named for May 2026, but the document’s own internal title is NutritionalAllergenListVivaChicken1.11.21, its footer reads “Updated on 1.11.21” (with older notes dated 2019), and the PDF’s embedded creation date is 12 January 2021. It is a five-year-old document behind a current-looking filename, and it predates several items now on the menu, including the Chicken Saltado, the Wow Lomito, the Chicken Caesar Wrap and the Naked Peruvian Wrap. If you are relying on it to place an order today, you are reading a guide that does not know about part of the menu.
Two further gaps matter. Viva publishes no ingredients for its beans, fries, plantains, yuca or vinaigrettes, and it publishes no cross-contamination, shared-fryer or shared-grill statement anywhere at all. The only disclaimer attached to its menu items concerns raw and undercooked ingredients. So for a lot of what follows, the honest position is that an item is on the menu, the published description names no animal product, and that is where the evidence stops.
Vegan Food at Viva Chicken
Even though it is famous for its chicken, Viva’s menu has a few things vegans can look at — with the caveats below.
Salads
Viva Salad
Viva’s published description of this salad is: greens, avocado, cucumber, red onion, tomato, queso fresco, balsamic vinaigrette.
An earlier version of this page said the cheese was feta and that holding it made the salad 100% vegan. The cheese is queso fresco, not feta. Asking for it without the cheese does remove the only animal ingredient Viva names — but Viva does not publish what goes into the balsamic vinaigrette, so “100% vegan” is not something this page can stand behind. Ask about the dressing.
Quinoa-Stuffed Avocado
This is on the menu as a salad. Viva’s description: avocado, quinoa, red pepper, rocoto mayo, balsamic vinaigrette.
The rocoto mayo is egg-based, and it can be left off. What remains is avocado, quinoa, red pepper and the vinaigrette — but again, the vinaigrette is undisclosed and Viva confirms nothing about the result. It is a reasonable order to attempt, not a confirmed vegan dish.
Limena Chopped Salad
The item is now called the Limena Chopped Salad, and its published description is: peruvian corn salad, edamame, bacon, crispy chickpeas, queso fresco, aji amarillo ranch. An earlier version of this page described a kale-romaine base tossed with solterito; that is not what Viva lists.
Three of the six named components — bacon, queso fresco and the aji amarillo ranch — are not vegan. You can ask for all three to be left out, which leaves corn salad, edamame and chickpeas. Note also that Viva publishes no vegan dressing option; the earlier suggestion that you could swap in a vegan dressing has no support on Viva’s menu.
Andina Power Food Salad
Now listed as the Andina Power Food Salad: greens, quinoa, avocado, edamame, red pepper, fruit, toasted almonds, passion fruit vinaigrette.
This page previously called it 100% vegan. The accurate version is narrower: no animal ingredient is named in Viva’s official description. That is not the same as vegan. Viva certifies nothing, and the passion fruit vinaigrette’s composition is undisclosed — fruit vinaigrettes commonly contain honey. It is the most promising item on the menu and it still needs a question about the dressing.
In the Mixes
Tacu Bowl
Viva’s description: choice of jasmine or cilantro rice, canary beans, avocado, green onion, salsa criolla (lime-marinated). No animal ingredient is named.
The problem is the canary beans. Viva publishes no ingredients for them, and Peruvian-style canary beans are frequently cooked with pork. This bowl cannot be confirmed vegan without asking specifically whether the beans are cooked with meat.
Peruvian Fried Rice (formerly Arroz Chaufa)
The dish this page called Arroz Chaufa is now on the menu as Peruvian Fried Rice: jasmine rice, red pepper, green onion, red onion, egg, soy sauce, ginger.
The egg is confirmed, and you can ask for it to be held. What this page used to say next — that doing so makes the dish “absolutely vegan-friendly” — is not supportable. It is wok-cooked alongside the chicken and steak saltado, and Viva publishes no statement whatsoever about shared woks or shared equipment.
Sandwiches and Wraps
Inca Burrito (formerly Inca Wrap)
Now called the Inca Burrito: sun-dried tomato tortilla, rice, canary beans, avocado, salsa criolla. It is the Tacu Bowl in handheld form, and it carries the same unanswered question about the canary beans, plus a tortilla whose ingredients Viva does not publish.
One newer wrap is worth naming so nobody orders it by mistake: the Naked Peruvian Wrap contains queso fresco and rocoto mayo.
Sides
Viva’s sides look like the easiest part of the menu for a vegan and are actually the least documented part of it. There is no ingredient list for any of them and no fryer statement at all.
French Fries
On the menu in small and large. Viva publishes no ingredient list and no fryer statement. Yuca and plantains are fried on the same menu, and the Steak Saltado is described as containing french fries, so a shared fryer is likely — but Viva never says. Ask about the fryer.
Sweet Potato Fries
Also on the menu in small and large, and in exactly the same position: no ingredients, no fryer disclosure, no way to confirm.
Green Beans, Yuca, Plantains and Canary Beans
Green Beans are on the sides menu in small and large. There is no “House Salad” side — an earlier version of this page appears to have confused it with the Viva Salad.
Three sides this page never mentioned are also worth knowing about: Yuca, Plantains and Canary Beans, all in small and large. All three are plausible plant-based picks and none can be confirmed: Viva publishes no ingredients, plantains are commonly fried, and Peruvian beans commonly contain pork.
Drinks
Viva Chicken’s drinks menu is limited to three house drinks, prepared fresh: Herbal Limeade, Maracuya (the Peruvian name for passion fruit) and Chicha Morada, the Peruvian purple corn drink. All three are on the current menu.
Viva publishes no ingredients for any of them. Nothing suggests they contain animal products, but nothing confirms it either, so they belong in the same unverified column as everything else here.
Summing Up
Viva Chicken is better than most chains at telling you what is in a dish and worse than most at telling you what happens to it in the kitchen. The published descriptions are how we know the Viva Salad contains queso fresco, the Limena Chopped Salad contains bacon and the Peruvian Fried Rice contains egg. They are also why no dish here can be called vegan outright: the beans, the fries, the tortillas and every one of the vinaigrettes are undisclosed, there is no shared-fryer or shared-equipment statement anywhere, and the allergen guide Viva links to is dated January 2021.
The practical version: the Andina Power Food Salad is the closest thing to a plant-based meal on the menu, the Tacu Bowl and Inca Burrito are close behind if the canary beans are not cooked with pork, and the two questions worth asking every time are what is in the dressing and what else goes through the fryer.
