Café Volonté, which now has three branches across London, was born in part from personal frustration.

“I moved to London just before university, and everywhere I would go, the healthy option was just a basic salad,” explains founder Vidushi Binani. “It was especially difficult because I’m vegetarian, and there weren't enough vegetarian protein options. Most of the time, this country and this city are cold and rainy, and I didn't find enough hot food options!”

From the available offerings, “When I looked into how they make their food, or when they started to list the ingredients, they didn't turn out to be that healthy”. Despite her searching, Vidushi never found a go-to spot during her time at university.

After going on to study nutrition and gastronomy at the prestigious Cordon Bleu cooking school, Vidushi set out to solve the problem herself. “I initially wanted to go into food retail, to create a line that would help people snack healthier”, she recalls. “I also wanted to have a restaurant of my own eventually”. This is when the idea of a wellness cafe first took hold; a space that filled the gap she’d noticed for years, and combined elements from both of these concepts.

Vidushi’s time at Cordon Bleu taught her how to practically apply nutrition knowledge and experiment with recipes. “If I can produce really good, tasty food at home, how hard could it be to produce in a commercial setting?” She asked herself. “I worked with a chef, and we managed to come up with a menu. I thought, okay, if we can get to this stage, why not try making it work?”

Deciding to go all-in on the project, “I thought, I’m young,” Vidushi says. “If this does end up failing or not going to plan, I’m still young enough to be able to turn my career around if I need to. I thought I might as well take advantage of that.”

You don’t have to look very hard to find someone telling you that if you try the latest diet trend, your life will improve almost instantly. Keto and Paleo; or maybe the more specific options, the regimens that celebrities or influencers swear by. Nearly every foodie TikTok or Reel starts with “you HAVE to try” or “Did you know”, opinions presented as facts and misinformation about health and nutrition running rampant.

“These influencers and people giving advice should always say, ‘This worked for me, but it might not necessarily work for you’. They’re not in any way qualified to be giving this advice, and they should specify that” Vidushi states.

The impact of misinformation is a problem that Vidushi has acutely seen at Café Volonté. “We've had influencers come into the cafe who have asked for certain things,” she says. “I've asked them why they want items to be made in such a specific way, and they have a very warped answer. A lot of times they've been wrong.” Once, for example, a customer asked for the cafe’s Greek avo toast with everything off. “It was just avocado and bread. I said, I can do that for you, but it’s not going to taste good! She proceeded to talk about how she'd quit all these things, including caffeine, and then she asked for a matcha latte. I wanted to tell her that matcha has a lot of caffeine, but I just couldn't.” Sometimes you have to pick your battles.

A particular bugbear is the gluten-free trend, which many adherents don’t understand the reasoning for. One client, after asking whether a dish was gluten-free, appeared not to know the difference between allergies and intolerance. “She looked at me like, “huh? What’s celiac?”, Vidushi laughs. “I had to explain the difference to her.” Although gluten does irritate the gut for many people, it’s become a ‘health’ trend in and of itself, another element of food to fall victim to demonisation. “A lot of the big snack manufacturers try to stick gluten-free on anything,” Vidushi observes. “Gluten-free popcorn is my favourite. Why would popcorn have gluten in the first place?”

“When it comes to food and diets and fads as an approach, the misinformation is presented like clickbait. People will take something that sounds very good and say, 'This is life-changing'. They forget to add that each person is very different.” People sharing their own journeys and what has worked for them is fine, but it needs to be clear that body type, age, lifestyle and the time that people can allocate to nutrition and exercise play a massive role in their efficacy.

“I mostly say, ‘eat whatever you want in the right portion size’,” Vidushi says, “but you don’t even have to follow that if there’s a specific thing that works for you. The main thing is to listen to your body more than people on social media.” There’s nothing wrong with trying things out, she continues; “there are a lot of fads that even I have tried”. However, “the minute your body gives a reaction or says, 'this isn't working for me', you need to respond to it,” she asserts.

“In high school and in early parts of university, people were into extremely restrictive diets. That’s what we call them now; a lot of people call them lifestyle approaches, but they're not.” Not only can these types of diets damage your metabolism and leave you worse off than you started physically, but the social and mental impact can be brutal. “The social aspect of eating and being out with family and friends is very important,” Vidushi says. “When you're very restrictive, you just cut that out. You don't go for dinners, you don't eat at parties. It has an impact on your well-being.” Denying yourself the pleasure of eating, the tastes and sensations of good food will leave you frustrated and unhappy. Nutritionally balanced, carefully proportioned meals might satisfy your stomach, but without satiating your mind and your taste buds too you’ll never feel full.

Along with the Café, Volonté also runs fitness space Energy Studios at two of its locations. This aspect of the business is led by co-founder Haylene Ryan Causer, an industry veteran who explained to Vidushi that the trends, misconceptions and misinformation that she was seeing in the food world were just the same in fitness. “She taught me that if you don't eat well, you won't be able to exercise well, but if you don't exercise well, your body will not use the food that you're eating properly and efficiently,” Vidushi recalls. “Very early on, we understood how the food and fitness relationship works. They both are very important in general when it comes to overall health.”

Both the food and fitness aspects of the business take the same approach to sustainable well-being, maximising rather than sacrificing, and embracing variety. “Just as how you have a favourite food, most people tend to have a favourite form of exercise and tend to only do that. Yes, any form of exercise is good for your body, but you also need a variety.”

From her own experiences, as a fan of high-impact, high-energy workouts “I never gave importance to working on my mobility, my flexibility,” Vidushi admits. “But to be able to do high-impact workouts, you have to do a lot of low-impact things to make sure you don't get injured. Most people will forget that.”

Intensity is often highlighted as a selling point for workouts. “There are some where you almost feel like you're having a heart attack when you're exercising,” Vidushi says, drawing on her own experiences of trying out these classes. Once the feeling of imminent demise has passed, “you feel good for an hour after, and then you get a sudden crash”, she adds. “The way those workouts impact your body, it's very natural for your sugar levels and energy levels to go up and down like that.”

In contrast, Energy Studios provides small group classes where the instructor can pay attention to each individual, making sure that they’re completing the exercises correctly and maximising their impact. An added benefit here is the personal touch; with small class sizes, the instructors get to know their clients; and vice versa.

“You won't necessarily come to our classes and burn 700 calories, but we do guarantee that if you do them consistently, you will, overall, be stronger and fitter, because we focus on all the little things that other classes miss,” Vidushi affirms.

“The whole idea of Volonte in general is, “if you don’t restrict too much you can maximise results without sacrificing. So if you are active, it doesn't mean you have to be running marathons every day, as long as you're moderately active, getting exercise a couple of times a week, that's when you truly can eat everything.”

From an exasperation with London’s lack of healthy vegetarian food to culinary school and a thriving business, Café Volonté is a testament to Vidushi’s determination and belief in her dream. With a strong ethos and a real desire to satisfy customers' minds and bodies, these healthy eating and sustainable well-being havens are a welcome addition to London’s foodie scene.

_

Lucy Carter is a London-based writer with a strong interest in the arts, entertainment and culture spaces. She can generally be found spending too much time and money at food markets and coffee shops or going on long walks around the city. To read more of her work, take a look at her Substack and Muck Rack and follow her on Twitter @lucyllcarter.

Featured