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.
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.