Keep it light and easy: Low carb summer eating across London

From zero-calorie noodles to salads that put a spring in your step, summer’s food is low-carb, says Phoebe Luckhurst 
Eat simple: Bel-Air’s coconut and pumpkin daal

Summer is a time for lightness. Of spirit — but also of plate. When it’s humid outside and thunderstorms are haunting the horizon, you do not seek hefty portions but gravitate instead towards sprigs of salad and chilled gazpacho and crudités that pack a crunch.

And it’s lunch where you really feel it — have anything too heavy in the middle of the day and it’s game over for your afternoon. You need to balance a complicated equation: something that will give you the energy to keep going, without sending you face down into the keyboard, eyes glazed and brain dead. Unfortunately, that likely means minimising your carbohydrates (just at lunchtime, mind).

One solution is to temporarily substitute your sandwich for one of Itsu’s zero-noodle lunches: its “magical” noodles contain zero carbs, zero fat and zero gluten, while successfully managing to remain corporeal. Predictably, they’re all low-calorie too: each of the three salads struggles to muster 200 calories in total.

The satay-chicken box layers pulled chicken breast, tenderstem broccoli and chilli flakes over zero noodles, tossed with peanut sauce and greens and ginger mix. The miso salmon is a similar story: poached salmon fillet, spicy sauce, green beans and furikake with zero noodles. Vegetarians can preclude a carbohydrate nap with the Greens & Beans salad: miso-marinated silken tofu with tenderstem broccoli, muki beans, red ginger and pumpkin seeds, tossed over noodles.

 Tuck in: Itsu’s Greens and Beans tofu salad, served with broccoli and ‘zero’ noodles

Ethos is a self-service restaurant — which gives it a generous, canteen vibe, though you won’t spy a turkey twizzler: it’s all vegetarian, and broadly pretty healthy. The main menu changes every day, but regularly includes Lebanese, Mexican and Asian dishes, some hot, some cold. Bel Air, which has sites in Leadenhall, Shoreditch and Farringdon, has a verdant collection of salads that you can combine into a box: the Asian Rainbow is a bowl of cabbage, carrots, pak choi, spring onions, peanuts and raisins splashed with ginger soy dressing, and the Broc and Almond Slaw is similarly saintly, involving broccoli, almonds, and cranberries with a buttermilk dressing.

Redemption, which has restaurants in Notting Hill and Shoreditch, also has a colourful carb-free menu: try the sweetcorn and red pepper pancakes served with avocado, coriander, chilli and lime guac, or the Temple of Ten, a deca-bowl of kale, red cabbage, carrot, peppers, mange tout, cauliflower, purple sweet potato, spinach, cucumber, mushrooms and spicy peanut sauce.

And Ahi Poké’s Signature Bowls are light options: the Sweet Green bowl is a verdant melee of kale, mushroom, edamame, confit ginger, radish and carrot. You can also build your own bowl — keep it fish and veggie-heavy and the protein should carry you all the way through to September.

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