Earlier tonight I was down at Food Secret on Broadwick St, Soho, for one of their demonstration evenings with their head chef Neil Armstrong.
As I said in my post last week they’re really into nutrition and freshness at Food Secret – you can go along and put together a hot soup, sandwich or salad on the fly, selecting from their fresh ingredients to make up what you want. They even prepare their pastes, sauces and stocks on the premises – so you can be assured that the pesto, harisa and so on that you put into your soup hasn’t come out of a jar. Now you might say that there’s nothing new there – in Soho in particular healthy eating has caught on. There are any number of other venues around that will offer the health-conscious a similar service, so let me tell you about what I think makes Food Secret unique.
What they’ve done, with help from nutritionist Sanna Anderson, is to devise a rather neat software application that helps you select precisely the right food for your dietary needs. Go up to the counter and start to put together your meal and you’ll see, on a large lcd screen below you on your side of the counter, the number of calories, amount of protein, carbohydrate and so on, as well as their unique star rating system, building up as you add more ingredients. So, for example, if you’re absolutely determined that your meal has to come in at 200 calories and only include 20% of your daily intake of fat , you can take things away from the mixture to get you to that exact figure with this really unique little visual aide.
The other thing that I think Food Secret has on its rivals is style. The walls and ceiling are lined in intriguingly lit frosted glass, and art and fashion videos are projected onto the walls all around the space. I wasn’t at all surprised to hear that when the big high-fashion people are in town for a show, such as Vivienne Westwood or Oswald Boateng, Food Secret is their first choice for catering to the nutritional needs of their notoriously fastidious models!
It certainly gets my recommendation for people who want tasty food but are watching their intake – given where I am at the moment I should probably visit them fairly often! I’ll also just mention their website, where you’ll find some sample menus but also some useful tips on nutrition. Of course they’re also on Twitter and on Facebook if you want to keep an eye on what’s happening at the store.