Let's start with an admission: especially when it comes to food, New Yorkers have a chip on their shoulder. After all, our culinary scene is the stuff of legend: if you make it here, it seems, you can really make it anywhere.
So we weren't exactly surprised when, back in 2022, Los Angeles’ high-end organic grocery store chain Erewhon went viral and New Yorkers collectively scoffed at the idea of a smoothie with supposed magical powers, an aesthetically pleasing glow and a very real $20 price tag. Secretly, though, we were all opening Google Flights tabs. (What better reason to cross the country than to try a drink, right?)
We needed to know what made Erewhon’s strawberry glaze skin smoothie, a Hailey Bieber favorite, so damn good, or whether the newer Coconut Cloud smoothie was anything more than an Instagram prop.
Fast-forward to today and New Yorkers with a flair for the gastronomically viral no longer have to fly to California to see what the fuss is about: Erewhon smoothies are officially available on this side of the country, delivered via Uber Eats and Postmates. To be clear, the company opened a very private outpost in the very exclusive new padel club dreamed up by Kith founder Ronnie Fieg. Although Kith Ivy members have access to the outpost in the West Village, those who aren't willing to pay $36,000 a year to get through the door can still order the smoothies for delivery.
Obviously, we had to try them. So we ordered all four available flavors to our NYC office the second they dropped and we have to admit… we’re confused.
Let’s start with the obvious: all four drinks—the strawberry glaze skin, the Malibu mango, the coconut cloud and the vanilla matcha—looked beautiful. The colors were magnificent, especially the blue and the green (which couldn’t be said about the flavors themselves, but more on that later).
The Time Out team immediately scooped up some of the blue coconut cloud smoothie ($24), made with almond milk, pineapple, banana, avocado, almond butter, coconut cream and enhanced with vanilla collagen and blue spirulina (all organic).
The consensus was that the drink was a bit too chalky, likely the result of the ingredient combo (almond, banana and coconut may be healthy but do they need to all show up at once?). As one team member put it… “It just doesn't taste right.” It does look magnificent on Instagram, at least.
Things got better with Bieber’s go-to, the strawberry glaze skin smoothie ($24), which tasted like an actual smoothie should.
“It’s very strawberry-forward,” a colleague excitedly pointed out, still recovering from the blue-drink disappointment. Will the combination of almond milk, strawberries, bananas, avocado, dates, maple syrup, collagen peptides (whatever those were), sea moss gel and coconut cream make our skin glow like Hailey Bieber’s? Probably not. But it certainly tasted good on the mouth.
Next up was the Malibu mango smoothie ($25.25), which ended up being, by unanimous consensus, the best of the bunch. Interestingly, it was also the one with the fewest ingredients (mango, pineapple, banana, vanilla collagen, coconut cream, lion’s mane mushroom). It got us wondering: what makes a smoothie good or bad? Although these drinks are marketed as healthy, the extra “functional” ingredients in the other two smoothies made them chalky and heavy and, if we're being honest, not all that healthy-feeling.
That became even more obvious once we slurped up the vanilla matcha smoothie ($26.50), which was more watery than the others and—sorry, Erewhon!—tasted a bit like Play-Doh. Was it the MCT oil? The marine collagen? The matcha itself? We’ll never know. What we realized through our little experiment, though, is that every city deserves the drinks its residents demand.
In the land of yoga and wellness, $20 social-media-ready smoothies that sometimes taste grassy may be exactly what the doctor ordered. In New York—the town of “we’ve got no time” and “let’s get moving”—maybe it's better to stick to a blended mango and strawberry with ice for vibes.