Wild Food Cafe - review

Packed out with a mixture of shawls and shorn-off haircuts and dreadlocks as well as some standard meat-eater styles, we squeezed onto the end of one of the communal eight-seater tables while others were perched at a central bar that surrounds the open kitchen.

The philosophy here is one of "vitality" and "wellbeing"- fed to customers through a menu of smoothies, salads, soups and sandwiches which are made mostly from raw ingredients not heated above body temperature.

But as with the majority of raw/vegan cafés there is always the option to digress and have some real cheese, your soup "steaming hot" or your sandwich between two slices of toasted sourdough, instead of in "sunfood crackers" - chewy squares of dehydrated flax and pumpkin seed pulp.

In the hubbub, our orders were briefly forgotten, so we sipped on our Tropical (mango, passionfruit, coconut) and Forgotten Ecstasy (raw chocolate) smoothies, content as we waited. At £5.50 and £5.20 respectively they owed us decent distraction.

We chose to mix and match from the menu. On the raw side we tried the Thai Tiger veggie noodle soup (£5), which of course contained no actual noodles but had a tasty combination of super-fine strips of cucumber, peppers, spring onion and avocado in a coconut broth and arrived at a baby-bear, ready-to-eat temperature; a "Squash-a-potamus" sandwich (£5.20), for which the two sunfood slices did little to hold in its squash and hemp raw houmus, which insisted on slopping onto the plate with each mouthful; and a sadly over-salted and bitterly dressed Crispy Seasonal Salad of foraged greens (£8).

Our act of betrayal was to try the Sheepy (£5.20), a sandwich in the traditional sense with sheep's cheese, shallots and pickles - and to enjoy it most of all our orders.

But no matter, since we were able to feel suitably vegetarian by tuning in to the conversation about Vipasana - a 10-day silent meditation course - being had by our tablemates as we ate.

So we got up to pay at the counter (cash only) feeling averagely satisfied, and to top it off chose a "Christmas chocolate" priced by weight to take away - a dark circle filled with fresh pomegranate that we were promised would be "worth it".

As our waitress handed us our bill we realised that we had just paid £10 for a chocolate. A large chocolate, yes, but still just a chocolate - and at that price it would have to be uncommonly good to be "worth it". Which it wasn't. I bit in to be treated to a tang that resembled vomit.

Everything was going just fine at the Wild Food Café, until then.

1st Floor, 14 Neal's Yard, Covent Garden, WC2. wildfoodcafe.com
Mon to Sat, 12pm-5pm. £40 for two with drinks and dessert