Vegan deli Motherboard opens today inside Green in Tempe

🌾 If you’ve been quietly mourning the Italian sub you swore off years ago, today might be your day. Motherboard, a new analog deli meats concept, opens today inside Green New American Vegetarian in Tempe, giving diners a dedicated, modern new-style deli built around artisan, 100% plant-based cured meats.

Not your average vegan deli counter

Here’s the thing about Motherboard: this isn’t shortcut vegan deli slop pulled from a factory case. Every single item on the menu – the cashew milk, the seitan, the spice blends – is made in-house, by hand. No assembly lines, no corner-cutting. Just old-school deli craftsmanship rebuilt from the ground up without the animals.

That distinction matters to the people behind it. The Motherboard team traces their obsession with cured meats back to a very specific place: a grandfather’s cellar outside Chicago, the kind with cobwebbed corners, jars of home-canned vegetables, rusty garden tools, and ropes of curing salami hanging from the rafters.

It’s the kind of formative, slightly musty memory that can haunt you or inspire you. For this crew, it did both. As they put it, ‘‘We are of, and from, the Middle West. The land of meat. Specifically, the land of encased meats.’’

Motherboard Meats is their answer to that legacy: high-protein, 100% vegan deli meats built on nostalgia, craftsmanship, and compassion.

What to order

Two sandwiches are already generating buzz:

• The Uncle Alan: a vegan riff on the classic Italian sub, loaded with sliced salami, capicola, and mortadella, topped with provolone cheeze and all the traditional fixings.
• The Neil Parmesan (pictured): a breaded seitan cutlet smothered in a ‘‘cracklin’ rosie’’ tomato sauce and melted provolone cheeze, for anyone craving a hot sandwich with real backbone.

Don’t sleep on the sides, either. Creamy macaroni salad and tangy pasta salad round out the old-school deli experience.

The bigger picture

Motherboard’s ambitions go beyond one sandwich counter. The team hopes this launch is the first step toward becoming a recognizable name in artisan vegan foods – proof that handcrafted plant-based meats can hold their own on flavor and texture, not just serve as a stand-in for the real thing.

Motherboard Deli is open 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Monday-Saturday.