Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop Kitchen just opened its first seed-oil-free restaurant
Goop Kitchen opened its first sit-down restaurant on a strict no-seed-oil menu. We checked the numbers behind the hype, and looked at why Sweetgreen's and Steak 'n Shake's own seed-oil-free claims haven't always held up.
Emily Harper
Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop Kitchen opened its first sit-down restaurant on August 31, 2026 — a 92-seat flagship in the One Paseo shopping center in Del Mar, California — and every dish on the menu is built around one rule: no seed oils, no gluten, no refined sugar, no processed additives. That's not a slogan for this one location. It's the same standard the brand has applied since it launched in 2021, and the fact that it's now worth opening a dine-in restaurant over says something about where "seed oil free" sits in the market right now: it's not a fringe wellness claim anymore, it's a business model chains are competing on.
What actually opened in Del Mar
The Del Mar restaurant is Goop Kitchen's 19th location and its first with real seating — 18 others are delivery-and-pickup-only "ghost kitchens." The menu leans into that first-dine-in-space moment with Del Mar exclusives like a "Field of Greens" salad pizza (pesto, garlic confit, mozzarella, parmesan, arugula) alongside the brand's usual bowls, wraps, soups, pasta, and wellness drinks like ginger tonic shots and cucumber soda. Yahoo
There's a number circulating about Goop's finances that's worth getting exactly right: Goop Kitchen's VP of Marketing, Jena Wolfe, said the brand's mature individual locations average roughly $6.7 million in annual sales each — that's a per-location average across the 18 ghost kitchens, not a lifetime total for the whole company. Goop has also said it's planning further expansion into La Jolla and downtown San Diego, but Wolfe was clear that, for now, Del Mar remains the brand's only sit-down location — the rest of that expansion still looks like more ghost kitchens rather than more restaurants you can walk into. Fast Casual
What "seed oil free" means on Goop's own menu
Every dish carries what the brand calls its "Goop Certified Clean" stamp: free of gluten, refined sugar, processed additives, corn, peanuts, preservatives, and seed oils. In place of soybean, canola, and sunflower oil, the kitchen cooks with algae oil, extra-virgin olive oil, coconut oil, sesame oil, and avocado oil. Goop Kitchen FAQ
Goop isn't the only one making this bet
Sweetgreen got there first among the bigger chains. It began pulling seed oils out of its kitchens in 2023, switching to extra-virgin olive oil and avocado oil for roasting vegetables and proteins, and launched a full seed-oil-free menu in January 2025. CEO Jonathan Neman framed it as a values call as much as a health one, pointing to the high-heat extraction methods used to produce seed oils versus the comparatively minimal processing behind olive and avocado oil. Salon
Steak 'n Shake made a louder, messier version of the same move. By the end of February 2025 all 436 of its restaurants were frying in 100% beef tallow, and the switch got a public shout-out from HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Restaurant Business
Except the tallow fryer was never the whole story. Not long after the switch, health creator Bobby Parrish tracked down the ingredient label on Steak 'n Shake's frozen fry supply and found they'd been par-fried at the manufacturer in "vegetable oil (contains one or more of the following: soybean oil, canola oil)" before ever reaching a restaurant's tallow fryer — meaning seed oil touched the product before the beef tallow did. TikTok / @bobbyparrish Steak 'n Shake's own site now addresses that gap directly, saying the company went back to its fry manufacturer specifically to eliminate the vegetable-oil par-fry step "at a considerable cost," and states its fries and tots are now fully seed-oil free. Steak 'n Shake The company doesn't say exactly when that fix landed relative to Parrish's video — which is itself the point: "seed oil free" printed on a sign is a claim about the finished product's cooking method, not necessarily about everything that touched the food before it got there.
The pattern underneath all three
Goop built its brand on being the strictest version of this, Sweetgreen retrofitted a national menu around it, and Steak 'n Shake backed into it as a marketing and political moment — three completely different playbooks converging on the same claim. That convergence is exactly why the claim is getting harder to trust at face value. When "seed oil free" is a genuine competitive differentiator, it's also worth exaggerating, and as the Steak 'n Shake fries show, even a chain that eventually delivers on the promise can spend months with a gap between the sign out front and what's actually in the fryer.
That's the whole reason Tallow exists: not to take a menu board's or a label's word for it, but to check what's actually been tested. If you're trying to figure out whether a restaurant near you is genuinely cooking seed-oil-free, or whether the "clean" packaged food in your cart still lists soybean or canola oil three ingredients down, search it on the Tallow app before you order.