For a certain kind of New Yorker, April 20 will be a holiday of sorts: It’s the day that Goop Kitchen arrives on the East Coast. For five years, since it opened in LA in 2021, people like me who are swayed by gluten-, refined-sugar-, peanut-, corn-, and seed-oil-free food had to get their Huberman’s Organic Turkey Chili on trips to Southern California. Now our time has come. And I got to be the first person in New York to try it out. The Brentwood Chinese Chicken Salad, I’m embarrassed to admit, made me cry.
First, a little history: The name Goop is derived from Gwyneth Paltrow’s initials. She gained fame in the ’90s as an actor, won an Oscar, and dated Brad Pitt and later Coldplay’s Chris Martin, whom she married. By the early aughts, she was a new mom living in London and at an inflection point in her life. She started a newsletter called Goop that included things like her recipe for vegan banana pancakes. Goop showed that Paltrow was more than her ice queen persona, that she had a personality, genuinely good recommendations, and ambition beyond acting. And it helped stake her claim as someone who cared a lot about wellness.
Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow eats the chinese chicken salad.
Isa Zapata.
Eventually Goop grew into skin care, a clothing line called Gwyn, a Netflix show, and a cruise. Five years ago Goop Kitchen became her fast-casual food brand with takeout options in LA and now the Bay Area. It sells capital-H health foods such as bone broth and kale salads and brown rice bowls, but there are also more indulgent albeit healthy things like pizza, for which the team assessed 200 different kinds of pepperoni before choosing one. It’s fun and healthy and delivered to your house.
Paltrow has been savvy at selling herself as naughty and nice. She freely admits to eating pasta and said in 2013 that she smoked asmoking a single cherished cigarette a week. (She told Vogue that she stopped smoking altogether in 2018.) Goop once made a candle called This Smells Like My Vagina (notes: bergamot, cedar, rose). Goop Kitchen is trying to do the same thing for food with brown rice bowls or whole roasted cauliflower that evoke the health food of the 1970s as well as barbecue chicken pizza and mac and cheese that leans more toward comfort food you’d gravitate toward after a long day. There are plenty of places that do a similar mix and have comparable prices: Meadow Lane, Happier Grocery, and Butterfield Market in New York; Cookbook Market and Erewhon in LA. But we buy Goop Kitchen because of Gwyneth Paltrow. We can eat Japanese Sweet Potato Soup and take part in a little of her well-honed mystique at the same time.
How long will it last? 2026 is not 2021, and the very ideas of wellness and health and what we put into our bodies have become political. Sweetgreen, the onetime salad giant, has struggled. Scaling a restaurant business is complicated and expensive. Only time and customer reviews will tell if Goop Kitchen will succeed. It may be what bankrupts me. In the meantime, here are some initial thoughts.
All of the menu items delivered to the Vanity Fair office for a taste test
Madison Reid.
Brentwood Chinese Chicken Salad
Asian-style salads aren’t exactly culturally accurate, but they are a California staple. This one had avocado that arrived without any browning, a mix of lettuce and cabbage and snap peas, and a very bright carrot-ginger dressing. It brought tears to my eyes. They say you can never go home again. I did.
Pepperoni Potts
This was by far the most sought-after dish among my coworkers. It has a crispy, thin crust that doesn’t try to imitate the chewiness of bread. You could serve it to kids and they might not think there was enough cheese, but they would have no idea that it was ostensibly healthy.
Miso Salmon Bento Box
The salmon portion was small and was a little salty and over-medium. But the accompaniments were thoughtful: a seven-minute jammy egg, rice, some edamame-cucumber salad.
The Goop Teriyaki Bowl
I couldn’t stop eating the marinated, almost caramelized teriyaki chicken. The broccoli it came with was a bit bland, and I wish there were an option for white rice rather than brown (a personal preference born from a childhood of poorly cooked brown rice).
Spring Crunch Salad
Order this for your healthiest friend. Why don’t more salads have asparagus? I also liked the generous dollops of goat cheese. Honestly this would be great with some crusty bread on the side but we don’t do gluten at Goop Kitchen.
Chicken Caesar Wrap
Easy, satisfying, crowd-pleasing. The Calabrian Caesar dressing is on the side, so the experience is one more of a dip than a wrap as we know it. But I prefer that for delivery as their grain-free tortilla isn’t so hefty.
Dark Chocolate & Sea Salt Brownie
Fudgy texture, nice amount of cocoa, and not too sweet, but a bit of an artificial aftertaste. But that’s if you’re really savoring it. I would probably eat it in two very pleased bites.
Coco Chocolate Chip Cookie
The office’s favorite dessert. No artificial coconut flavoring here. Soft and comforting.
Blueberry Lemon Layer Cake
No one’s favorite. The lemon cake was a bit gummy in texture. The blueberry jam would have been better on some yogurt or in porridge. The only person who liked this has been described as “a raccoon” for her willingness to eat anything.