Feature writing

The A-lister wants to be the queen of healthy fast food. Tim Teeman orders from her New York kitchen

There are many things Gwyneth Paltrow is known, and mocked, for, among them “conscious uncoupling” from her ex Chris Martin, and the ludicrously expensive and dafty-sounding products sold through her company Goop. Its 2025 gift guide included a $3,500 clay pot moulded by two bodies and a $95 Ultraplush Self-Heating G-Spot Vibrator.

In 2018 a Californian court forced Goop to pay out $145,000 over unscientific claims it had made about the health benefits of using vaginal “eggs” made of jade and rose quartz, and a book published last year, Gwyneth by Amy Odell, alleged the company had struggled with profitability, and had a “chaotic and sometimes toxic” workplace culture. Paltrow responded in an interview with Vogue, saying: “That bothers me. ‘Oh, Goop has a toxic culture.’ That drives me insane because we have never had that.”

Now, enter Goop Kitchen and Paltrow’s desire to become queen of the healthy takeaway. Watch out, Pret A Manger and Chipotle. Paltrow’s attention has shifted from our erogenous zones to something far more contested: what food New Yorkers want to order in and take out. A sample of her wares —including Smashed Fingerling Potatoes and her Everyday Kale and Brussels Salad — proved so delicious it may silence those used to smirking over Goop’s $1,285 advent calendar (even if gold-plated handcutts and a silk blindfold were included).

Goop Kitchen opened in NYC on April 20, with a (gasp!) affordable line of chicken Caesar wraps, bento boxes and salads to go. The only eggs are of the edible kind, and everything is gluten-free. Goop Kitchen is growing fast: Fast Company reported that its 14 locations in California, where it launched in 2021, have already processed an estimated three million orders.

“I’m very involved in ideating all of the dishes,” Paltrow recently told the food website Eater. “There’s pretty much nothing on the menu that I haven’t had a direct hand in shaping. This whole thing is my brainchild. It comes from my cookbooks and years of feeding my family. I really wanted to do something the way that I cook, which I think is full of a lot of flavor, and also very clean and healthy. It’s an area that I think has been lacking.”

Paltrow revealed last year that she had moved away from a strict paleo diet. “I’m getting back into eating some sourdough bread and some cheese. There, I said it. A little pasta. After being strict with it for so long,” she said on the Goop podcast.

However, lest you think she now nods off on the sofa in a puddle of smashed Pringles, she added that she was still “eating foods that are kind of as whole and fresh as possible”.

Paltrow also told Eater, “I haven’t found anything in New York that solves the problem of what should I order that’s really delicious and healthy,” which is an absurd charge: many New Yorkers are fanatical about their health, and the city caters to every dietary whim.

As well as there being no gluten, “all sauces and marinades are made in-house land] are free from processed sugars, processed foods, gluten, dairy, corn, peanuts, or preservatives”, Goop Kitchen states.

Maybe, but what a bizarre place Manhattan’s first Goop Kitchen is. It doesn’t exist as a restaurant with a takeout function, or even as a physically visible kitchen. Inside its address — on West 46th Street in the heart of the Broadway theatre district, a few doors down from the Church of Scientology — you alight on the Picnic Digital Food Court. It’s a featureless, claustrophobic hub for multiple takeout companies where you can order food via a machine, then wait for invisible hands in the invisible kitchens to make it — or go online and order food for delivery or takeout.

It feels a bit like a lost-property office or product pick-up point. Your order either appears — in a white Goop bag emblazoned with the lower-case slogan “good, clean food is in the bag” — from within white lockers or, as in my case, is handed over unsmilingly and wordlessly by a worker behind a counter.

It’s not exactly dystopian, but – delivery order in hand – I did gaze, misty-eyed, at the well-populated restaurants of Junior’s, Sardi’s and Carmine’s and their tables of chatting, munching clientele on my way to the subway.

My neighbourhood recently lost a much-loved diner and another casual dining spot. And it is exorbitant rents that led Paltrow to set up Goop Kitchen in this way. “Because we are very much not a restaurant, we are maximizing revenue per square foot, and therefore our unit economics are much more ditferent than a restaurant,” she told Fast Company.

Most of the lunch items I taste-tested were between $15 and $20 (bar the cake, which was $9.95). My Pepperoni Potts Pizza ($24.50), named after Paltrow’s character in the Marvel films, featured delicious pepperoni on a thin-crust 12in square pizza, with crispy fermented rice-flour dough – all packaged in a pretty, green-striped box.

Also delicious was the Miso Salmon Bento Box, featuring teriyaki-glazed salmon, organic brown rice, pickled ginger and wasabi, seven-minute egg, furikake, edamame and cucumber salad, cabbage and bok choy slaw with carrot ginger vinaigrette, toasted sesame seeds, and a side of teriyaki and miso honey vinaigrette — with the salmon particularly well cooked and flavoured. (‘Nothing gets on the menu without me loving it,” Paltrow told Eater, adding that this is her favourite dish.)

The Everyday Kale and Brussels Salad – featuring finely shaved kale, Brussels sprouts and green cabbage salad, aged white cheddar and avocado – is made distinctive with the addition of a side of candied puffed rice and seed mix, lending a moreish crunch to an otherwise solid dish of virtue. Then there were those ambrosial fingerling potatoes, and a little pot of Caesar dressing perfect for dipping them in.

While other takeaways can sometimes stint on vegetable freshness, not Goop.

The Goop Teriyaki Bowl wasn’t let down by broccoli-as-afterthought but rather by overdone chicken and claggy rice. The Chicken Caesar Wrap was another dud: the wrap casing as unyielding as a used chamois leather, the chicken filling a sawdust-dry mass and the surrounding lettuce lifelessly stiff. Similarly blah: the Blueberry Lemon Layer Cake, denuded of any taste but whose creepily heavy consistency suggested an unmet calling as wall cavity filler. (Missing from my order: a Falaf-OH Hummus Wrap.)

Next in New York will come Goop Kitchens in East Williamsburg, the Upper East Side and Flatiron. If success is ultimately hers, Paltrow will hope it means she becomes better known for her salmon bento than those much-mocked, legally costly vaginal “eggs”.