Open daily breakfast 9am–11am, lunch midday–3pm, dinner 6pm–11pm
Fresh with a shit load of cash from flogging Harrods to the type of people he would otherwise be accusing of some conspiracy or other, Mohammed Al Fayed has freed up a little time to bankroll his offspring’s vanity project on Westbourne Grove, vegan restaurant Farmacy. Incidentally, it’s not actually a vegan restaurant because it serves eggs. So they call it a ‘Veggan restaurant’ which will make you hate them out of principle before even setting foot in the front door. The word is ‘vegetarian’, you imbeciles.
Anyway, so here we are. It’s nice inside. Plants everywhere.
“That’s for you if you don’t understand anything on the menu,” the waitress said as she handed me a little booklet. The indignity! As if I wouldn’t understand any of the items on the menu. It’s all vegetables. How hard could it be?
Turns out she was right, I didn’t understand the menu at all. Chiefly, I didn’t understand why everything cost so much. I mean, talk about sustainability and organic all you like, but there is no way that broccoli costs more than steak. Except in Farmacy.
I read through the guide a bit. Whilst having better grammar, it was very much like something a snake oil salesman in the Wild West might have had in his day, using nonsense pseudoscience in a misguided effort to convince you that the ludicrous prices accompanying each item are somehow worth it. They aren’t.
In the end, I had the ‘Chef’s special curry’. Well that’s a good name, because the chef must be very fucking special if he thinks he can get away with charging fourteen quid for three lumps of broccoli and sliced peppers in a curry sauce that tasted as though it came out a can. I did sift through it a few times, worried that I might chip my tooth on a diamond that had been added to justify the price of a tiny dish that wouldn’t fill up a dormouse.
But no, all I found was some ‘probiotic rice’. I’m not entirely sure what the benefits of it are but making rice probiotic appears to be a very special method of removing enjoyment and giving it the consistency and taste of regular Uncle Ben’s rice that’s been left under an incontinent pensioner’s mattress for a few days.
Speaking of Uncle Ben’s rice, has anyone seen the advert for it with ‘the body coach’ Joe Wicks? He knocks up a bland chicken curry as if he were curing cancer and acts like the result of successfully mating Heston Blumenthal with Jamie Oliver.
Then, right at the end, as he puts the insultingly bland dish in front of the camera, has the nerve to say “naughty” in the sort of tone that butchers every single vowel in the word and would make an English teacher resign from the profession and start self-harming. It’s an advert that always gets followed up with a visit to John Lewis to buy a new TV and a trip to A&E to remove my foot from the old one.
‘Naughty’ is what someone might say if they were 19 and just about to double drop in the queue outside some warehouse rave, not when they’re some mockney chancer knocking up a radioactive packet of tasteless rice.
Anyway, back to Farmacy. On request, I had one of their syringe shots. These nonsense-elixirs come ‘bottled’ in a syringe that you inject into a shot glass and drink yourself. They taste like shots in as much as they are fucking disgusting but sadly they don’t get you drunk.
There is no reason for these to come in syringes other than to double the price and create a moment for utter bellends to post on their instagrams. Further indignity burns when you when you realise you have just paid a 150% mark up to effectively serve the drink to yourself and you realise that the only syringe you should be using at Farmacy is one to inject a massive load of high-grade smack into yourself to help cushion the blow of the exorbitant prices.
Because it’s expensive. Did I mention it was expensive? It’s fucking expensive. I saw Roman Abramovich in there. He looked through the menu, started sweating and then fucked off to Nando’s.* Apparently Cocotte (average, over-priced), the “healthy rotisserie” opposite, is doing a roaring trade now. Because, after dropping a bomb on some aubergines in Farmacy, unsatisfied starving diners head straight over for some chicken drumsticks coated in butter. [*this may not be true]
Farmacy can fuck right off. It will do well though, because that’s what happens when your dishes cost 60p to make and between 10 and 20 quid to buy. Yes, you too can join Farmacy in helping to save the world, provided you operate most of your personal finances in the Cayman Islands.
In a nutshell
For the record, despite not being one myself, I think vegan restaurants are a good thing and we should all be doing our part to lessen the impact of mass animal consumption on the planet. Just don’t do it here, because any restaurant that has to produce a separate guide as some kind of justification or explanation for the insults they knock up in the kitchen doesn’t deserve it.
