Food For Thought, Covent Garden

Food For Thought
31 Neal Street
Covent Garden
London WC2

Lunchtime in Covent Garden offers a few choices for vegetarians, and one of the most popular is Food for Thought in Neal Street.

When we arrived, the doors were only just opening and there was a queue of half a dozen or so people outside. We joined the queue and very soon more people were behind us.

Food for Thought has a sit down restaurant downstairs and a takeaway section upstairs. From the menu boards, they both seem to sell the same stuff.

To say that the downstairs restaurant is cosy is an understatement. However, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, as I can imagine that all sorts of converstations are struck up by people forced to share tables. It isn't really the place to sit and enjoy a long, leisurely meal, its more the kind of place that you pop in, fill up and then leave, so even if its full, it probably wouldn't take too long for a space to become available.

You select your food from a counter, pay and then take your seat. I had butternut squash and apricot soup with coriander pesto and Jamaican Blackbean Hotpot. My wife had a moussaka and a salad. The soup was quite nice, the apricot gave it a slight sweet taste. The hotpot was tasty, but on tasting a bit of the moussaka, I noticed that the tastes of both were very similar. Still, it was filling, and just the kind of thing that would warm you up on a cold day. The salad was lovely. Best of all, are the prices. For the two of us, it cost us around fifteen pounds. Not bad at all for a hot filling meal in the West End.

Overall, I wouldn't choose this restaurant for a 'meal out'. But if I just needed a quick, hot meal at a reasonable price then I certainly wouldn't overlook Food for Thought.