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Do you know your spinach from your spirulina? Have you swapped your freshly squeezed orange juice for cold-pressed kale? Does your idea of going green involve liquids rather than a paper bag? If so, you’re already a convert to London’s latest super-food trend: juicing greens.
Now that sugar, along with fats and gluten, is the enemy, vitamin-rich bulbs, brassicas, roots and leaves are having a moment, especially once they’ve been pulverised. It’s a craze that’s come fresh from California, endorsed by nutritionists and celebs including Gwynnie, Rosie and Jake and a catwalk fave at LFW last week. Greens spotted backstage: Imbibery London at Nicole Farhi, Roots & Bulbs at Tom Ford and Plenish at Christopher Kane. Yup, the clear plastic beaker filled with emerald- green liquid is the new clutch accessory: eat your heart out, skinny Starbucks; take that, Mulberry!
Home juicers who don’t want to splash out £1,500 on the ultimate juicer — the Norwalk hydraulic juice press, a monster from Bentonville, Arkansas — are buying up other bad boys. John Lewis and Lakeland are reporting a huge rise in sales in the past two months. Expect to pay £50-£300.
A quick glance at Amazon UK also reveals a spurt in juicy publishing, with no fewer than 23 titles out this month alone, among them Juicing for Beginners, Juicing Without a Juicer, An Easy Guide to Juicing, Juicing Bible for Weight Loss, the Ultimate Juice Bible, Everything Juicing, Hearty Juice Recipes You’ll Never Forget (sounds ominous) and my favourite: Grief Relief, a guide to juicing your way out of emotional turmoil. Now that sounds promising. And not surprisingly, a whole new crop of juice bars is springing up in London faster than a field of dandelions. So just who are the hot new juicepreneurs?
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ROOTS & BULBS
Roots & Bulbs opens on Monday in Marylebone. Its founder, Sarah Cadji, decided to swap hedging funds for juicing hedges in 2009 after a decade of overworking in finance and discovering her immune system had been shredded. Cadji swears she hasn’t had a cold since starting to juice three years ago and credits her radiant health to her signature G1 juice, a smorgasbord of celery, spinach, cucumber, parsley, lemon and ginger. The designer bar features a rammed earth bench made from compressed, layered soil. “Customers can touch it, look at it and feel the truthfulness and reality of where their vegetable juice came from,” says Cadji. Just don’t start digging.
Signature juice: Greens G1, £4.99 for 250ml.
Delish rating: Sharp and fresh: 4/5.
JUICE TONIC
Former health coach Marco Proietti, who’s just opened the first of several JuiceTonic bars in Soho, spent 11 years studying nutrition and Chinese medicine in the US before coming to London to “help out the health revolution”. He sells bespoke detox cleanses for everything from fertility problems (which require milk thistle, ginger, nettle and red clover) to thyroid rebalancing, and his signature Green Detox contains all the usual suspects, plus a dose of liquid zeolite, which may sound like a kind of fertiliser but is a supplement its manufacturers claim removes metal toxins from the body.
Signature juice: Green Detox (spinach, kale, cucumber, parsley, coriander, apple, lemon, ginger, dandelion, liquid zeolite), £6 for 330ml, £7 for 400ml.
Delish rating: Sweet like bruised apples: 3/5.
LOVAGE
Over in Shoreditch is the just-opened Lovage window bar in the Ace Hotel, a “seasonal farm-to-street takeaway juice kitchen based on the idea that wellness comes from nature”. The achingly hip joint is now selling juices to sustain, heal and cleanse. Not as austere as the other two, Lovage recipes include sneaky sweeteners such as honey, dried fruits, unrefined sugar and lucuma — a milled powder from an exotic South American fruit with a flavour apparently like sweet Parmesan.
Signature juice: Viridian (kale, fennel, squash, apple, herbs, wild greens) £5.50 for 200ml.
Delish rating: Vibrant colour, like being in a field; silage taste: 2/5.