By Chloe looks just how you’d expect a vegan fast-food restaurant to look: like a pristine McDonald’s, with more pastels, and fancy egg chairs hanging from the ceiling instead of chunky plastic booths.
The winning dish (off a much-hyped menu of burgers, fries, salads and pasta) turned out to be a pesto meatball sub. The mushroom and veggie ‘meatballs’ came in a soft potato bun with tangy pesto, roasted peppers and cashew mozzarella – and it actually tasted like a proper Italian sub.
Everything else was more miss than hit. The classic burger was okay, but the bun was dry and the tempeh-lentil patty far too thin (what was there of it was vaguely tasty, though).There was sweet potato in the side of mac ’n’ cheese, which gave it a strange, smokey taste (not in a good way), and the ‘fish’ and chips with crispy tofu was way too greasy and unfulfilling for lunch. For dessert, there was a truly awful, gritty chocolate cupcake and two ice-cream ‘push pops’ in matcha and ‘birthday cake’ flavours that were cute and nicely portable in their plastic cases, otherwise forgettable.
A vegan place like this in central London will probably survive whether I want it to or not – but if you’re vegan in London, you can do much better. I hope everyone in the line that was snaking around the restaurant on my visit figures that out.