Healthy kicks don’t come much fresher than the newly opened and much-awaited Natural Healthy Food store & eatery on Suffolk Street, with a fantastic view of The Mailbox. Priding itself on providing healthy vegan food, free from refined sugars, gluten and preservatives this extensive clean-eating place of worship has sprung freshly forth from its original shop in Digbeth and with Birmingham’s first Kombucha (fermented green tea) Bar, it’s somewhere that promises to nourish both body and soul. The lifestyle innovations do not end there. To discourage food waste, food is priced by weight (you fill up your plate from a buffet and it gets weighed at the bar). Add to this an array of loose leaf teas, served with timers to allow the tea to diffuse to its best, and you have a truly modern dining experience, that leaves you feeling surprisingly relaxed. The best dishes are those that don’t seek to imitate meat, the lemon and lime wholegrains, Sri Lankan dahl curry, vegetable chilli and mixed greens are superb and amongst the raw foods available, the most surprising was the savoury and satisfying raw onion ‘bread’. The tea range is also phenomenal. Rose tea, gunpowder tea, phoenix honey tea and then there’s the formidable fermented green tea kombucha, The Basil Dapper (strawberry, basil, black pepper, and balsamic vinegar) and The Rootilicious (beetroot, turmeric and ginger). Despite the free-from ethos desserts do enter the fray with a bitter chocolate brownie not quite living up to the promise of its sugary counterpart for us, but the probiotic dragon fruit cheesecake deserving of an award for the name alone and the key lime pie the stuff of a sugar-starved sweet-tooth’s dreams. Birmingham has been waiting for somewhere like this for too long and it’s good to know that somewhere in the city finally has the planet’s back – and tastefully too.

Natural Healthy Foods Store & Eatery, 24 Suffolk Street, Queensway, Birmingham B! 1LT. Tel: 0121 647 3681 7 days a week, from 10am – 9pm food 1.30pm – 8:30pm. www.naturalhealthyfoods.co.uk