Five years ago, corporates complained that it was impossible to get a healthy lunch. Well, praise be: now you cannot move through the City without being confronted by a fast-casual outlet touting some sort of swattishly nutritious boxed up lunchstuff. So much so, innovator Tossed, the salad brand, is now seen as downmarket. The Salad Project, Stem + Glory, and of course Farmer J earmark a new era of LA-style healthkick lunchspots with clout, and intimidatingly cool (read: cringey and pretentious) aesthetics. The Salad Project, with its avocado green floor-to-ceiling grid of salad pick-up lockers and next-to-zero staff, with salads that seem to appear from nowhere, is eerily dystopian. These new openings might have proven that London can make a darn good salad, but their business models rely on pick-up-and-go clientele who rush back to the office. Despite the fancy food, the seating area in Farmer J feels McDonald’s coded. At that popular outlet, the door is always open, and it’s freezing. I suppose the compromise in this economy is having a small location somewhere decent, rather than a big location with seating somewhere crap: take your salad and be gone.
That was how things went, or at least until Honest Greens opened in Soho this past month. Honest Greens serves fairly recognisable food: great piles of hearty green things. There is charcoal-grilled Piri Piri chicken, tuna tataki with ají amarillo, and the grilled avocado nikkei and pistachio caeser crunch. Everything’s fresh and multicoloured and the sort of food we really should be eating every day. Like Farmer J, it’s affordable: a good meal costs between £12 and £15 and you leave full. Much is cooked over open fire and divided into ‘Market Plates’ and ‘Garden Bowls’ and everything is versatile, suited to a lunch or dinner.
Honest Greens: Farmer J could never feel this cozy
So far, so samey. What’s new that we haven’t seen at Farmer J? Honest Greens has cushions. Loads of them. And cubby holes to curl up in, from which you can conduct a chinwag with your nearest and dearest for the duration of an evening. In central Soho. For £14. Perhaps we shouldn’t be exploiting new openings solely for their warmth and comfort, but then again, we live in a city in which dinner costs £50 if you’re scrimping and saving. Sometimes you just want a Caesar salad and a glass of wine and a catch up without it costing the better chunk of a Ryanair flight to mainland Europe, and dear reader, if this is you then I suggest you go to Honest Greens.
Other than it being a mighty fine place to bed in for the evening for the cost of two pints, there are other good things about Honest Greens. For £3 you can get limitless blueberry and grape juice from those fun drinks dispensers you push your glass against. They’re great for Dry January, with a grown-up bitterness to them to substitute the proper stuff (they have wine and beer too). Honest Greens is also a tried and tested formula: the brand is already popular in Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon and Porto. ‘Hg’ as they call it in short form may not be big culinary news in the capital, but its format certainly is. Find me downstairs on St Anne’s Court, Soho, every soggy evening from now until May.
Go to hg.uk