The Plant-Based Menu At W6 Garden Centre Cafe Is Coming Up Roses

There's something wholesome and, dare we say, romantic, about eating in a garden centre, even on a rainy day. Set in the small but pretty W6 Garden Centre, this café is a taste of that at-one-with-nature experience that urban nine-to-fivers salivate over.

The two-sided menu is unpretentiously simple, designed around what are often termed ‘food fads’: vegetarianism, veganism and gluten-free diets. Indeed, the overhaul of the cafe’s once meat-heavy menu was met with sizeable opposition from locals, our waiter tells us. That is, until they tasted the food, all of which is organic and locally-sourced; sometimes as local as the garden centre itself.

We start off with the celeriac soup and the beetroot salad, on our waiter’s recommendation. The nourishing soup is a welcome remedy to a sullen Saturday afternoon. The beetroot salad is a colourful fusion of roasted sunchokes, chopped chicory and chunky beetroot, drizzled with a piquant blackcurrant dressing and topped with cream cheese — a delightful mix of flavours and textures.

For our main, we order the tamari mushrooms on toast and the signature burger. The tamari-infused mushrooms are wonderfully aromatic, balanced nicely by the subtle sweetness from the ricotta cheese. The sweet potato and black bean burger is also very tasty, if a little mushy.

We skip pudding, though the cafe does offer a tempting selection of baked goods. And while selling the plant-based menu to locals was no bed of roses, we suspect it is coming up roses now.

W6 Garden Centre Cafe, 17 Ravenscourt Avenue, W6 0SL