Natural Kitchen

This time, we tried the restaurant. The best thing was the friendly and efficient service.
Pan-​fried Cod Fillet with Pea Mash looked beautiful, but the cod was overcooked and the sauce lacked flavour; it needed more lemon zest. Pea Mash was full of flavour and was tasty.
The NK Classic Aberdeen Angus Steak Beef Burger arrived warm — not hot, and the burger was overcooked. Caramelised onions and tomatoes were sour and the Sweet Potato Chips were tasty but limp. The Mediterranean Lemon Tart arrived, beautifully decorated, but the taste was disappointing. The pastry was soft and too thick, and the filling was not enough.
The place was very, very noisy, so it was very difficult to talk.

Really like natural kitchen. Good for an informal business lunch. Good juices and healthy options. The one thing is that it is quite loud and the tables are quite close together.

Great lunch venue and packed when I arrived.
Loved the food in Natural Kitchen. I had the macaroni cheese which was cheesy served with a fresh carrot salad. Good value for the price. There was plenty of variety of food which was nicely displayed under a glass counter. The staff were very friendly. I would recommend this venue to friends and look forward to visiting it again.

This place has nice fresh food, but it is on the pricey side.
Two of us sat down for lunch and split the thai fish cakes starter and the gnocchi main. The Thai fish cakes tasted fresh and had a good kick of lime to it. The gnocchi again was very nice and had cheese stuffed inside.
We ended up paying £12 each (without drinks). The service was really nice, the food was really nice, but for the portion sizes I though the cost was a little on the high side.

There aren’t such a great variety of decent sit-​down lunch places here, but this one fits the bill (with some issues). I had lunch here with a couple of colleagues yesterday, and was quite satisfied.
Tip: Make a booking ahead of time, even if only half an hour ahead, for quick seating.
So this place focuses on healthy-​ish (minus the delicious-​looking french fries), natural, organic, modern British cuisine. I say healthy-​ish, because lots of it was actually unhealthy. But it seems healthy, which is a big selling point today I suppose.
I had the sea bass with vegetables, and a soda. I don’t remember what my colleagues had, but it looked good and they seemed to like it. My food was quite good! The fish was very well cooked, tasty but not over-​seasoned. The vegetables were also well-​cooked, and not under-​seasoned.
The two downsides were the time and the price. Our food took more than half an hour to arrive after ordering, which is an eternity by City of London standards. Everyone in there is a businessperson, and I felt minutes out of my billable life slipping away as we waited.
Perhaps that’s more a commentary on the sadness of City life (my life?) than the restaurant, but you have to accomodate your customers.
The second downside was the price. My food was good, but with service my total was about £23. It’s not horrible, but a bit more than I’d pay on a regular basis if I wasn’t here for work and charging this to my client.
Overall though, nice atmosphere (feels light and airy even on a gloomy London day) and good food. A nice bet for this part of the City.

Sit down is great.
Takeaway is frantic, confusing and expensive.

As of a month or so ago, Natural Kitchen began to charge VAT on the salads for eating in. Their prices have always been on the high side, but now a box with three types of salad and a meat costs £7.95 for takeaway, and a staggering £9.55 for the pleasure of eating in their canteen-​style area. A tenner for essentially a takeaway salad is a bit outrageous hence the award of only two stars.

Yes, everyone now relies on me to suggest a place to eat, drink, or stay at because I do extensive research that involves Unilocal!Inevitably everyone asked, «Where are we going to eat Heather?» Work BFF and I were considering a certain chain restaurant because we had a craving for one of their salads. The boys were not very keen on this and while Work BFF was ready to ditch them, I pulled up my bookmarks on my handy dandy Unilocal!App…
After everyone had their say about my bookmarks, it turned out that The Natural Kitchen seemed to be where everyone wanted to go. It is in New Street Square, which is pretty cute in itself. Like an oasis in Blackfriars. Anyway we had to have an early dinner to catch the coach back with our students. They do not take reservations… FYI. The décor is lovely… very country chic. They have a takeaway counter and the food in the display looked absolutely delicious, especially the salmon.
We took advantage of the ‘Free Bottle of Wine’ deal. If you spend £30, you get a free bottle of wine… and FYI… there is no limit on how many bottles of wine you can redeem! For example, we spent £80 (there were five of us…) so we ended up with two bottles of wine. They do charge a 12.5% service charge, which does not count toward your bottles of wine ;). Anyway, it was difficult to choose what to have for dinner! I had to order last… but I went with the Wild Boar Burger, there were two others that ordered the Wild Boar Burger, Professor Snape (he looks just like Alan Rickman, but not as Professor Snape, however that seems to be one of the few roles many of our students know Alan Rickman for… so that’s what I am going to go with) ordered the Rustic Seafood Stew, and Work BFF had the Portobello Mushroom Burger… yes because she did not get her stuffed mushroom earlier at lunch.
The waiter came back a few minutes later saying that they never tell him anything, but that the house wine had changed and they only had two Wild Boar Burgers, but they were also out of the Tuna Salad and the Salt Marsh Lamb Burger… all things that Casual Ian had been looking at. I offered to change my order, since I had never had Wild Boar and was starting to second guess my order. However, Casual Ian insisted he would change his order and he decided to go the route of Work BFF with the Portobello Mushroom Burger, but with sweet potato wedges instead of chips. Again the waiter came back and asked if the chef made the sweet potato wedges as chips, would that be ok. Everyone said yes.
The food came out and it all looked wonderful! The Wild Boar Burger just smelled delicious… on the burger it has an apple fritter, smoked apple wood cheese, and thyme mayo. Warning: the apple fritter is very hot and can burn your mouth! However, the entire burger was amazing! The combinations were great and the Wild Boar itself was delicious… well-​seasoned, juicy… just done really well. The chips were good too and there was a lightly dressed salad on the side with green apple slices… in keeping with the apple fritter on the burger. Work BFF and Casual Ian enjoyed their burgers… in fact Casual Ian getting close to licking that plate clean again! Professor Snape seemed to like what he had, but did not think it was anything special. However, he was impressed with the ‘hunk of bread’ that came with the stew.
I just deducted the one star because they seemed to be out of a number of things, which would have been nice to know before we placed our orders. The food, however, was really good and I would be back in a heartbeat. Again, for the area, the price might be reasonable, but anywhere else, £15.50 for a burger, might be considered pricey. However, the portions were quite (American quite, not British quite) large and they are locally sourced.

The place had good service and this review is only based on one thing: the burger. It was supposed to be spicy but was rather not, and the meat was rather tough. I heard about a burger revolution in europe, but it has not found it’s way here.

This place reminds me a bit of Coral Tree Café in Los Angeles (likely no one gets this reference but me) perhaps because they have similar fonts but also because they’re both one of those organic, we-​eat-​on-​wooden-​tables-​with-​no-​finishing-​pain-​quotidien-​style lunch venues that are a solid, safe choice.
Even though my baked goat cheese salad was not the salade de chevre chaud that my heart had hoped it would be, it was still quite delicious and definitely guaranteed I would be returning soon for another irresponsibly lengthy work-​day lunch. The fresh juice offered was also a nice touch and I gleefully ordered a helping of carrot juice (my favorite!) much to the poorly-​disguised horror of my lunch companions.
This place was busy but not too crowded but the service was a bit slow, though not the worst. Definitely worth a visit if you work nearby!

Just as one might expect of a place called The Natural Kitchen, this space is warm, organic (lots of wood) and flooded with light.
While I certainly enjoyed my lunch at the City outpost far better than my breakfast at the Marylebone location the Natural Kitchen has yet to convince me.
My wild mushroom and goat cheese sandwich with chargrilled vegetables and basil pesto was not terrible but the pesto was a bit minty and I found that ever so slightly off-​putting. It was also quite a mess to eat and very greasy. The accompanying hand cut chips were satisfying but at £10.25 this experience did not represent terrific value no matter how you added it up.
Perhaps the other choice I had been weighing — teriyaki salmon with stir fry egg noodles and Asian vegetables — would have provided more satisfaction?
One thing I loved about my lunch? The supremely fresh carrot juice.
This menu’s selection is nothing short of bountiful: fish, salads, pasta, gnocchi, risotto, sandwiches, burgers, even tapas like Cornish cuttlefish, spicy vegetable nachos and chargrilled chorizo.