Eating salads is like being in a long-term relationship. You need to stay creative, playful and passionate to keep things fresh and exciting. We heard many people saying that salads can get boring. Not for much longer!

Here are five ways to boost your every-day salads:

• Add nuts or seeds for healthy fats

We love pumpkin seeds for this. Gram for gram same or higher protein content than ground beef. If that’s not enough pumpkin seeds are super rich in zinc and tryptophan which boosts immune system and enhances your mood!

• Add seaweeds for added mineral content

We love soaked hijiki - it has great texture and no fishy taste! Also try fresh seaweeds like wakame, kelp, kombu or sea lettuce. You can easily get them in all well stocked health food stores, Wholefoods, Planet Organic or our very own Wild Juicery!

• Sprinkle with green powders for an immune system and energy boost.

Try kelp flakes, chlorella powder, spirulina, barley grass, nettle powder or sea greens. They are all great sources of trace minerals, protein and iron. 

• Top with pro-biotic vegetables eg. sauerkraut, kim-chi

As we mentioned in our previous blog, probiotic foods are super awesome for your intestinal health and can make all the difference! You will digest food better, have more energy and stronger immune system!

• Add super food salad dressings

 Now this is where it gets interesting. Salads can get boring unless you are super creative and playful with them. There are infinite flavours and combinations to explore, so don’t be shy — create your very own, unique salad dressing.

Here’s one of our favourites:

Goji and Incan berry super-food dressing

80g Goji berries soaked for 15 mins

30g Inca berries soaked for 15 mins

150ml water

70g tahini

20g raw honey

2 tsp lemon juice

1/2 tsp salt

Blend in a high speed blender until smooth, dress your salad and enjoy! Incan berries are the highest content protein fruit on the planet. They are very nutrient rich and will give you lots of energy.

Feel free and playful to try different combinations and make something completely crazy and outrageous. We would love to hear from you (send us your super-salad pictures and we will share them with everyone)!

Here’s your challenge of the week: create a super-salad that is truly and uniquely yours! What is your favourite salad dressing and how do you make your salad authentic?

You can reach us via Facebook page, in the comments below or via email at info@wildfoodcafe.com

With lots of love & spring blossoms,

Aiste, Joel & the Wild Team

We have a confession to make.

We were meaning to share this since the day we opened our doors, but all our energies and focus were on making delicious food creations.

So here it is, brace yourself: we are not a raw vegan restaurant.

Let us explain:

 We are absolutely head-over-heels in love with plant-based food. We love it. Adore it. We invest a lot of our time and energy exploring different plant based possibilities. We Innovate. Expand. Create. Play. All with beautiful plant-based ingredients.

We do empathise deeply with the intentions and ideals of vegans and raw-food enthusiasts. Joel has spent over 15 years in both of these camps himself and the Wild Team always have people on different paths of their own nutritional journeys: be it vegan, raw, vegetarian or omnivorous.

Naturally, we make a small minority of people really upset by being all-inclusive and serving some whole-heartedly prepared cooked food and by using some high-quality organic & biodynamic dairy.

Fact is, we could easily run a fully raw vegan kitchen. However, we chose to do what we do for a few important reasons:

• Our mission and vision is to share amazing, mouth-watering, uplifting food that makes you go WOW – and pack it with as many nutrients, mineral rich foods, colours, flavours and love as possible.

Food that makes you open your mind, that goes beyond the clichés of vegetarian, vegan or raw.

That goes really to the core what food and nourishment is about. That inspires, that makes you happy, that makes you wanna share it with friends, make something new at home.

That nourishes your vast, expansive, glorious soul.

• We love playing and experimenting and staying light-hearted about the whole ‘nutrition’ and ‘right’ & ‘wrong’ thing (more about that below). If we want to blanche something we will. If its colder outside & we feel like making a hot soup we will. If we feel like making a highest-quality-artisan-grassfed-organic-unpasteurised mozzarella-based sandwich we will. And we will feel happy about it. We love what we do!

• We are passionate about bringing the best quality ingredients from all spectrum of nutrition to the table. That includes wild foraged leaves from Wales, slow-cured unpasteurised olives from a lovely family in Turkey, the best quality biodynamic eggs from a small eco-community farm in Sussex, and some cheese and milk from Neal’s Yard Dairy: an awesome small company that promotes high-quality, artisan producers that love what they do. (We love spreading awareness about high-quality products produced with extra high-standards of animal welfare in mind so that more people wake up from consuming ‘factory farmed’, mass-produced products).

• We realised that we inspire so many more people to expand their wellbeing and explore their everyday nutritional choices by being chilled, laid back, and all-inclusive about the food we serve at the café.  We spread our ideas and vision far and wide by focusing on creating what Kriss Carr and many others calls “plant-passionate” dishes and forgetting about the politics, dos and don’ts, rights and wrongs.

• We love seeing people relax and get into their playful, happy state when they realise that it is probably ok to have a bit of cooked food or a bit of the highest-quality dairy if that’s what their body wants!

So here. We said it. You either like us or don’t. What’s important to us is that we stay true to ourselves and tell the whole world about it! :)

Do let us know you thoughts, comments and feedback about your experiences being or not being strictly raw vegan and how it makes you feel about other people’s nutritional choices. You can contact us via Facebook page, in the comments below or via email at info@wildfoodcafe.com

Needless to say, we do successfully serve vegan and raw guests every day, we strive to mark all our creations as clearly as possible and you can always notify our team of your dietary preferences and individualise your meal the way you and only you imagine it. 

We leave you with Joel who writes:

I observe that although I have met some of the healthiest (by which I specifically mean overflowing with happiness and vitality) people eating plant-based raw food I met some of the least healthy (and most neurotic) people preaching the same concepts sometimes professing as teachers, authors and experts. Wellbeing, like all of life is a very multi-dimensional expression.

These experiences, concepts, and movements can be great tools to help us along our journey and provide reflection for introspection and deeper inner guidance to emerge. At the same time if we become too serious about them or attached to them, they can be our downfall and our ball and chain.

Nutrients and nutrition are wonderfully liberating and potent allies. Neurosis about nutrition or any other part of our lives comes from externalizing our wellbeing. We create our wellbeing through the vibrant aliveness of our consciousness, and the life which flourishes from it: more and more vibrations of unconditional appreciation, joy, ecstasy, love, expansion. Any other external factor, including food is important, however: secondary.

I have seen people who eat what-some-may-label toxic junk food being considerably happier than some people who are extremely intellectually educated in nutritional philosophy.

Our search for balance and centre in nutrition continues, since the centre itself is always moving, but now it is a fun, continuous exploration for us.

It is about listening to the lightness of our inner being and bodies and not having rigid rules. A thing that was the best for me yesterday may not be even worth me considering today. A diet that was serving my body a year ago, may not be serving me now. For me it is all about playful experimentation and asking the questions: ‘is this really the most ecstatically fulfilling choice for my body?’ ‘Would I really loooove to do this- will I really enjoy the vibe which is left in its wake?’  ‘Body, what would you like to enjoy today?’ – and really listening to and being thankful for direction this playful adventure leads us today.

With open-hearted smiles & appreciation,

Aiste, Joel & The Wild Team xox

There’s something about raw cakes you should know: they should not taste ‘healthy’! 

Don’t worry, by ‘healthy’ we mean cumbersome bitty mixes of hemp seeds, goji berries, spirulina and nuts that get stuck in your teeth and make you wanna go and get a traditional baked chocolate brownie or two.

We are certain about one thing: raw cakes should and can taste amazing! Forget amazing. Mouthwatering, mind-opening, ecstatic, uplifting….that’s more like it.:)

We take real pride in our cakes and get really creative with them. And yes, they are dairy-free, refined sugar-free, gluten-free, flour-free but not because we have to. Because we love creating innovative, mouthwatering, ‘new-generation’ stuff that blows your socks off.

They are really not that hard to make and we encourage you to try it yourself! Here’s a classing raw chocolate tart recipe for you to start with:

Raw Chocolate Cake

Base:

1 1/2 cups almonds

1 cup raisins (or chopped up figs)

3 tbls coconut oil, melted

2 tsp vanilla extract

2 tsp cinnamon

1/8 tsp salt

Blend all ingredients together and press into a spring form cake tin.

Cake filling

4 avocados

250g cacao powder

50g lucuma

pinch of salt

1 tsp vanilla

280g coconut oil melted

130g coconut sugar

1 cup water

Blend avocados until smooth, then add all other ingredients and blend together in a food processor. Pour mixture over the base and leave to set in the fridge. Decorate with fresh raspberries, cherries or cacao nibs.

This week we challenge you to get creative and innovative and make your own raw cake - give it a try, use our recipe or make up your own! Share your experiences with us in the comments below, our Facebook page or via email info@wildfoodcafe.com — we would love to hear from you!

One final thing: all our cakes are now available to order. Birthday, party, wedding, engagement, or you just want to treat yourself and your family - you name it. You can pick your flavours, size, ingredients and we will make it for you. Prices range from £50-£80 for standard cakes. Available as pick-up from Wild Food Cafe only. 

With lots of love and chocolatey appreciation,

Aiste, Joel & the Wild Team xoxo

Today I am visiting my family in the Baltics. And what astonishes me here every time is the abundance of raw, unpasteurised foods.

They’re not raw and unpasteurised because of the ‘new raw food movement’ which is actually very prominent and buzzing here. No.

They are raw and unpasteurised because they’ve ALWAYS been that way.

What a gift. The tradition of culturing and natural foods have been preserved.

 Read on to find out about the most important unpasteurised products to incorporate into your lifestyle and why.

Unpasteurised Honey:

 Did you know that unless you buy premium quality artisan honey in UK, you are buying pasteurised honey which has all of its high enzyme content destroyed by the heat. Essentially, you are buying a processed sweetener. We always emphasise the importance of choosing a premium quality honey: ideally brought from small artisan producers that care about their bees.

It supports small beekeepers that love what they do, it supports the bees, and it provides you with enormous amount of nutrients and enzymes that are just void in the supermarket honey. This one is important.

Unpasteurised Fermented Stuff:

 Essentially sauerkraut, miso, beer, cider, kombucha, kvass, the list goes on…. and all other marinated and preserved relishes. In their unpasteurised state they all have friendly bacteria that balances and strengthens our internal flora bringing more wellbeing and considerably boosting our immune system. All these products have been made for 1000s of years for a reason. Pasteurising them kinda negates their purpose all together. Simply put, they are just too good to miss out!

In UK you can get unpasteurised sauerkraut but you have to ask for it and read your labels carefully. If it doesn’t say it is unpasteurised, it is probably because it isn’t. In fact we stock two kinds of raw sauerkraut in Wild Juicery, we make our own kim-chi (Spicy Korean version of sauerkraut with purple cabbage), along side with miso and kombucha: friendly bacteria heaven indeed:)

Unpasteurised dairy:

Now dairy and animal products is not everyone’s cup of tea, but if you do consume dairy, you need to know this an here’s why:

Pasteurising dairy changes its structure leading to mucus, colds, asthma, lactose intolerance and many other health problems. Fact.

Once upon a time unpasteurised & fermented dairy was the only dairy. I remember when I was little girl standing by a cow in my grandma’s village and waiting with anticipation for my grandma to milk it. Then drinking a cup of warm, foamy, fresh and sweet milk. Woa – what an experience!

We invite you to take an extra mile and if you use dairy, use the best quality, organic, grass-fed, unpasteurised (or at least not homogenised) stuff.

Again, it is the love for animals, our own wellbeing, small producers and environment that makes it an absolute winner for us. We suggest you try Neal’s Yard Dairy – they’ve got some amazing unpasteurised cheeses and good quality milk; and Farmers Markets. You can even order unpasteurised dairy straight to your home from some biodynamic farms.

Here’s your challenge for this week: what unpasteurised foods are you consuming on a regular basis already AND what foods are you consuming that are not but SHOULD BE unpasteurised? Leave a comment on our website, in an email info@wildfoodcafe.com or our Facebook page – we would love to hear from you.

Wildest Love,

Aiste, Joel & The Wild Team

It was a sunny spring afternoon and we started opening our big green windows to allow some fresh breeze in. We just passed the lunch peak and the café settled into a more mellow afternoon. Friends meeting friends, relaxing, catching up, having engrossing conversations, laughing.. Another cozy & lively afternoon in Wild Food Café.

We were sitting at one of the tables sipping green tea and scribbling our notes, absorbing the sounds and conversations. And then it hit us. Wild Food Café is a Retreat. It is an experience!

Let us explain:

When we opened the café in our heads and hearts it was all about creating an oasis in the centre of town. With this intention in mind we got on with our day-to-day stuff doing what we do best: yummilicious, colourful, creative, nutrient-packed dishes that fulfil people on many levels.

Little by little this intention grew and expanded into something bigger: a vibe, an atmosphere, a healing sensation, happy thoughts, you name it – a being in its own right. It went way beyond food and nourishment. It became spacious and timeless.

Native American shamans say that all healing is about distractions. They distract patients with fun, laughter, music, light, taste, sensation till the patient’s mind reaches a good enough place for wellbeing to naturally come through.

We love distracting people from the hustle-bustle of London with a welcoming, relaxed atmosphere, heartfelt hospitality (both great for digestion) as well as delicious, mind-blowing, made-with-love-food. Food that allows people reach a good place within themselves and bring even more wellness into their lives. On all levels.

It might sound a bit woo-woo, but here’s how it works:

Most of our guests come to Wild Food Café driven by a little bird on their shoulder encouraging to take care of themselves today, to get away from London rush, to get extra nourishment on more levels than one.

Sometimes we hear people telling each other on the street or around social media: “You should have a Wild Food Café experience – you will loooove it!”

Or “I am having a Wild Food Café experience today – it’s been too long”.

And, sipping green tea on a sunny afternoon it suddenly makes sense – everyone is having an experience here! Experience that brings more positivity, goodness, wellness into their lives. And that’s a retreat.

What a joy it is to experience it together!

So thank you everyone for co-creating such a delicious oasis in the centre of town. We love creating this together with you. 

So here’s our question for you:

What does Wild Food Cafe represent to you- Right here, right now? 

Leave your comment below or like always jump over to our Facebook page where most of the interactions happen.

Biggest Love & Appreciation,- 

~Celebrating You,

Aiste, Joel & the Wild Team xoxo

We started getting parcels of Wild Garlic few weeks ago our wild forager friend Yun and the Mountain Food Company. Seems unlikely with almost no vegetation out there, but it is official: the wild garlic season has started. If you don’t believe us, you can come over to Wild Food Café and have a Wild Salad where we are featuring this wild fragrant gem.

If you wanna eat seasonally look out for all sorts of fresh tender green leaves in your local farmers  market. That’s the time they come out and that’s when they are at their best.

We are talking: wild rocket, wild garlic, nettle (oh, try the soup, we will post a recipe soon!), watercress, baby chard, leeks, spring onions…

If you are a bit adventurous like us, this tip is especially for you: one of our favourites and nutritionally rich, free superfood is hawthorn buds and baby leaves. They have a gentle, delicate taste and are packed with nutrients that regenerate your blood and heart. Hawthorn bushes grow everywhere in London and UK — make sure you pick a pristine area in a park or forest when foraging.

Edible greens is the spring’s way of saying to us: regenerate, replenish after long cold winter months – eat all the vibrant greens you can see!

Fresh spring greens carry very special qualities: they are full of energy, vitality, nutrients and, to take it even further, happy vibes. I mean, look at them guys popping out of the earth – they are so full of life and energy!

So here’s your task for this week: go to your local farmers market (or your local wild space) buy or forage some fresh spring greens and whip up a yummy, vibrant, energising salad, pesto or soup! Post your pics on our facebook wall – we would love to share them with everyone else.

Have a wonderful week everyone!

With much love & happy green vibes,

Joel, Aiste & the Wild Team

We know it was still snowing last week and has been bitterly cold, but in theory, it is April. The clocks have turned and the whole of Neal’s Yard is kissed with plenty of light and sunshine till 7pm or later. We can’t wait for the evenings with open windows and a warm breeze caressing everyone in the café while you guys enjoy your food, meet with your friends and have the time of your life.

 To celebrate the new season and to accommodate your requests we decided to open on SUNDAY evenings and WEDNESDAY evenings. Yes yes, let us explain.

On Wednesdays we will stay open till 10pm. Last food orders 9.30pm.

On Sundays, a lot of you like to chill in the late afternoon — and for a while now the 5pm closing time just felt too early. From the 21^st of April we will stay open till 9pm, last food orders 8.30pm. 

 The best part about the new opening hours is that we are launching it together with new, fresh and vibrant spring menu.. We can’t wait to incorporate new season ingredients and play more with lively colours, and simple yet effective taste combinations.

On Wednesday the 17^th of April, we’re gonna hold a celebration of the new season, new menu and new opening hours so come by from 6.00pm onwards for delicious tastings, music & laughter. Let’s get that spring going good and proper!

If you are signed up for our newsletter, you’re gonna get 20% off all food & drinks on the night. Yupee!

Inspired action for the week: Google ‘seasonal produce April and your location’, have a look what’s coming out of the soil right this moment, go to your local farmers market and get it. Incorporate it in your dishes, make a salad, allow the nourishment of the new season to support and empower you. Till next week (we’re gonna be talking more about seasonal foods and how to make the best of them).

With much love and appreciation

Team Wild

Did you know that every single day before we open, we have a team breakfast together? Yes we do and we love it;) Usually we take 15-20 minutes and use this time to connect and to get ourselves ready for the most amazing day ever! It would be a shame not to.

All of our Wild Team are very much into their nutrition and wellbeing journeys, so there’s a lot of entertaining conversations, exchanges and explorations that happen at the breakfast table. Sometimes some of the team are ‘juice feasting’, sometimes they are ‘only raw’, sometimes it is ‘80% raw’, other times is ‘I-am-on-100%-chocolate’ kind of day (you get the drift, ha ha:)).

We are always exploring and continuing making changes in our nutrition and lifestyles. Sometimes our experimentations seem darn-right ridiculous, but never ever pointless:) This attitude very much influences the menu and the leading-edge, playful direction of Wild Food Cafe. We love love love to explore, experiment and play.

At the moment most of us are off the processed wheat flour and its products. And we loooooove it! That’s the reason not long ago we introduced organic sprouted wheat “berry” bread on our menu as an alternative to classic organic sourdough (of course raw cracker option is still available!!).

This little mighty bread is as unprocessed and full of goodness as ‘bread’ can get. Whole wheat grains are soaked for a period of 48h, then gently mushed together into a naturally sticky dough and baked at low temperatures. Nothing else. No yeast, no flour, no refinement. Just wholesome goodness.

This bread goes AMAZING with our living falafels, burgers and pretty much every possible option on the menu. It is a lot more nourishing and filling, but leaves you feeling lighter and doesn’t have any bloating effects that sometimes come even with the best quality organic sourdough white. Some people with gluten alergies can tolerate this bread too!

If you haven’t yet, we do suggest you try a sandwich with this bread. Isn’t it the most amazing sensation in the world to find something completely new that you thoroughly enjoy and that amplifies your wellbeing? Go, try:) It is on the menu everyday at Wild Food Cafe.

** What are you planning to do this month - or today - to amplify and magnify your vitality and wellbeing? —

Go, do it now and share your experiments with us on our Facebook page!

Celebrating LOVE with Wild Family and Friends!