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When was the last time your dinner came with a complimentary meditation pod sesh? Because that’s how things are done at Yeotown Kitchen. An offshoot of the Yeotown Devon health retreat, this claims to be ‘London’s first mindfulness café,’ though that actually isn’t shoved down your throat chakra too much. The focus here is more on the food and juices.
That last one is worth mentioning because Yeotown make seriously dreamy smoothies and – ahem – Yeotonics. They’re not cheap (presumably because Marylebone), but they are delightful. A ‘Creativity’ smoothie was like sipping silky cake mix (in a good way), thanks to creamy almond hazelnut butter, and a zingy Yeotonic with kefir tonic water was genuinely rejuvenating.
The yin to this yang is that the food wasn’t as good. Everything on the menu is vegetarian or vegan – except one dish from each savoury section, featuring salmon and/or mackerel. It seems a fairly pointless and arbitrary addition, and frankly, it’ll piss off some non-meat-eaters.
What with all the health vibes, you’d expect the Bounce Back (vegan) cheeseburger – filled with lentils and quinoa – to be, well, healthy, but instead it was modelled on the current junk food trend. It wasn’t terrible, just a bit lacking in flavour and slathered in excess sauce. Sparse sweet potato fries were lukewarm and we were given different condiments to those advertised – no big deal, but for a £14 burger it would have been nice to know beforehand.
A Courage Bowl of veg and pulses was more enjoyable, though still essentially a fairly plain salad disguised as something more interesting – plus there was little of the tofu we paid a £3 surcharge for.
Yeotown makes a great juice bar, but an average restaurant with above-average prices. But hey, you can always mindfulness-away any negative feelings in a meditation pod after dinner.