Tibits, Mayfair, London

Were it possible to eat your fill and get a drink for £5 from this place, I’d happily give it 5 stars because the food is really good. It’s modern, trendy, clean and fresh and the food is tasty. But I fail to justify to myself paying £10 for a veggie lunch when it didn’t feel particularly filling, even though it was very tasty.

Despite my gripes, I think this place will do well but guess that I’m not the target consumer as if I have to eat in the city everyday, I can’t afford to come here. If you do - be weary as £2-3 per 100grams doesn’t sound bad, but somehow on a plate you have no concept of weight and it doesn’t look like a lot.
If you are on a budget grab a soup and a bun for around £3, but even that didn’t look like a big meal. Trendy, tasty but just over-priced in my books.

Well, when a place has a strap line of “Veggie Conquers London”, and is being talked about as one of the coolest new restaurants around, as a vegetarian, you’ve kinda got to check it out. So I did. Really fantastic decor, lovely vibe (opposite trendy Momo’s), but I’m not sure the food lived up to the promise. Love the concept, really healthy vegetarian food in a modern setting, rather than going down the hippy route (why does everyone think veggie’s are hippies who love cheese with everything?), but something about the food didn’t grab me. It was nice, but I can think of other better veggie restaurants I’d rather go to like Food for Thought.

The salad bar has loads of choice and I actually had food envy and probably should have opted for this, but instead I went for an antipasti sandwich stuffed with aubergine, sundried tomato and pesto + a small hungarian vegetable soup. Tasty but didn’t blow me away. I also had a rather nice bowl (bowl??) of flowering Jasmine tea, which was perfectly fragrant and sweet. So on paper I should absolutely love this place - cool setting, good service, veggie cuisine and lots of herbal teas, but something about it didn’t excite me. Very pricey too.

Hmm tricky one this, because they’re obviously on to something but it’s not quite there yet.

They’d only been open a couple of months when we went for lunch so there were more staff than customers, but I”m sure that will change (especially in this location), and I’m always a bit wary when you have to have the 'concept’ of a restaurant explained to you when you walk in… so here’s the concept:

You take a plate, fill it up from the (admittedly lovely) buffet selection which features a lot of really nice veggie delights (I particularly liked the dahl and the deep fried jalapenos), and then you go to the counter get a drink and then…they weigh your plate to work out how much to charge you.

And this is where the problem comes in. It is so easy to mug yourself in a place like this. I had a little selection of about half a dozen things (incl some rocket and quinoa, which don’t exactly weigh a lot) and end up paying about £9 for it - and this is before I’d got anything to drink.

I don’t mind paying for decent food (and the food is really tasty) but I don’t want to have to approach the counter with my fingers crossed hoping I haven’t somehow managed to spend £15 on potato wedges.

I just know I could go to Beetroot on Berwick Street and get a box stuffed full of very similar food for under £5. Ok, so the decor on Berwick Street isn’t that plush but do you care?

What a disappointment!! I had read about this place just in time to show off to a vegetarian friend who was visiting. Big mistake.
Ironically, I went to the original “Tibits” on a visit to Zurich a few years ago and remember being really impressed with the concept.
Easy enough: you find yourself somewhere to sit; you grab a plate and fill it with lovely food from the hot and cold counters; you take you plate to the counter for weighing, order a drink and pay; you enjoy your food.
Only problem: the price.
The food was lovely, but my meal just about came to a collection of snacks at more than £13. We left feeling hungry and ripped off.
I am a big fan of interestingly cooked and prepared vegetarian food, but you can now get this type of food at Fresh & Wild.
No wonder the place was empty - we were jealously looking across the road to the queues outside ever-popular Momo.
While I remember the Swiss original to be quite cosy, the London branch feels like an upmarket office buffet.
I don’t think this will catch on.
The food’s OK, but money would be much better spent somewhere else.