My Failed Attempt At Tracking Down The UK’s Answer To Erewhon – And The Closest Equivalents I Found

I want to taste the nectar (a bottle of hyper-oxygenated water that retails for £20 at Erewhon), but all I can find are cans of peach-flavoured DASH water in health-adjacent food shops in East London, where people in brown shoes shovel nuts into bulk bins. I, too, would like to stave off death with a macrobiotic diet and post things about rebuilding my gut microbiota in a way that makes it clear I make better life choices than other people. But: I’m 5,431 miles from the nearest Erewhon, and while I could virtue signal from inside a local Holland & Barrett, Balenciaga is unlikely to reproduce its shopping bags and send them down a catwalk. That’s because nowhere approaches wellness with as much decadence and scenedom as Los Angeles.

Much like Demna, I’ve never actually set foot inside an Erewhon, and so I tasked myself with finding the nearest London equivalent. I got close in Daylesford and Natoora, but I should have known that this would be a doomed quest from the get-go, because a British Erewhon does not – cannot – exist. The LA grocery store’s reputation as a “health is wealth” hinterland where essence of self-optimisation is blended into every £20 Hailey Bieber Strawberry Skin Glaze Smoothie has disguised what it actually is: a Garden of Eden for people with Instagram blue ticks. The Soho House of supermarkets. In the United Kingdom, most people don’t do their weekly shop with the intention of seeing and being seen, and most people would baulk at the sight of £24 carrots. Unless, perhaps, they were being advertised as grown on King Charles III’s Highgrove Estate.

But if – like me – you still feel the pull of a bone broth every now and then and/or the compulsion to spend inordinate amounts of cash on fermented foodstuffs, these are London’s closest answers to Erewhon, albeit with fewer people swiping through Raya in the aisles.

Harrods Food Hall

Part of the reason why Erewhon could never really be a thing in the United Kingdom is that British people seem to operate within a different value system: the rich will always position heritage over health fads, which makes Harrods’s 1903 Food Hall a worthy rival to Erewhon. It also sells takeaway sandwiches for £28 – complete with Wagyu beef, truffle and gold mayo – which means it’s just as expensive. While sentences like that one might strike fear into the heart of Los Angeles nutritionists, the Harrods Juice Bar is among the finest and most extravagant in London, with prickly pear, rambutan and Rainier cherry concoctions for the virtuous yet adventurous.

Panzer’s Deli

In 2021, Douglas Booth proposed to Bel Powley with a picnic on Primrose Hill consisting of food from Panzer’s Deli – bagels, smoked salmon, chopped herring, egg mayonnaise, and caviar. Established in 1944, this is the archetypal London deli, its comforting babkas, warm challah loaves and fresh bagels a wholesome alternative to the froideur of an Erewhon. Harry Styles famously gifted Liam Gallagher with £3,000 worth of sea bass from Panzer’s in 2019, and Salma Hayek picked up her pumpkins there in 2020. It helps, too, that Panzer’s Deli has an “It” tote bag, sort of like a Daunt Books, but with produce from 80 different countries instead of travel books.

Daylesford Organic

To stroll around Daylesford’s Cotswolds flagship – a 29-acre Market Garden with 2,350 acres of organic farmland surrounding it – is to calm the nervous system. And I know at least a dozen editors who have come to rely on its chicken bone broths to get through the Sisyphean task that is fashion month. See also: the Good Gut Wellbeing Hamper curated by Daylesford’s resident nutritionist. That’s before mentioning Daylesford’s various Bamford Spa outposts, which place a special importance on the healing power of crystals. If Erewhon had a soul, I think it might look a little like Daylesford.

Natoora

With stores that look a little like the inside of Kim Kardashian’s house, Natoora is unusual in that it values aesthetics almost as much as it does seasonality. Its aim is to combat the market monopoly that traditional supermarkets have assumed in the UK, replacing the latter’s intensively farmed produce with puntarelle and bergamot oranges, Jerusalem artichokes and radicchio. “My vision is for Natoora to re-educate customers by revolutionising the quality of fruits and vegetables available through everyday channels, all over the world,” its founder Franco Fubini explains. “The produce on our shelves reflects what’s growing in the soil at any given time.” Visit any of Natoora’s five London outposts and you will see why Cuore del Vesuvio tomatoes have the highest flesh-to-seed ratio and why the proponents of Erewhon cannot get enough of the Murcia-grown Meyer lemons.

Ottolenghi

Earlier this week, Emma Corrin was photographed on a North London stroll, returning from Ottolenghi’s newly opened store in Hampstead. Bundled in scarves, hoods, and snoods, the Golden Globe winner was papped with a shopping bag bearing one of the most tacit of status symbols: a painterly “O”. At this point, we all understand the prestige that clusters around Yotam Ottolenghi’s restaurants and delis. This will, in fact, be old pat for lots of Londoners in the same way that Erewhon discourse is a source of fatigue for those living in California. But that doesn’t mean it’s not good. Cranberry and hibiscus marshmallows, jars of tangy and sour lemon paste, lightly spiced jammy peppers. Abundant salads assembled from the most chaotic, delicious pairings of blood orange and anchovies, miso and peanut butter, plum and tarragon. Perhaps one of the most alluring aspects of shopping at – and eating at – Ottolenghi is the knowledge that you are joining a cult in which every member believes themselves to be a gourmand.

Bayley & Sage

Jennie Allen opened Bayley & Sage in 1997, and it now has 14 “rustic” outposts across the capital. It’s a place where eating well means eating indulgently: crumbly tarts, creamy éclairs and giant meringues, which is obviously the antithesis of Erewhon. Still, even if a Tesla-driving Los Angeleno who’s just discovered the spiritual powers of sea moss might struggle to understand the appeal of a “shabby chic” London deli where strings of dusty sausages are piled into reclaimed crates and big crags of cheese are spread across the lids of wooden barrels, we Brits get it.