Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop Kitchen is about to serve food to people sitting in actual chairs for the first time in its history. The wellness brand's fast-casual food venture opens its first eat-in restaurant on Monday, August 31, inside the One Paseo shopping center in Del Mar, marking a sharp turn away from the delivery-and-pickup-only model that built the company.
The 92-seat restaurant occupies the 3725 Paseo Place storefront, a space previously home to health-focused chain Tender Greens, according to SanDiegoVille. One Paseo has steadily reshuffled its dining lineup toward recognizable lifestyle and health brands, and Goop Kitchen's arrival fits that pattern. Per Fox 5 San Diego, the Del Mar restaurant will be Goop Kitchen's first-ever sit-down location and its first eat-in outpost in San Diego County, joining 15 existing California locations concentrated in Los Angeles, Orange County and the Bay Area.
Design-wise, the space was shaped through a close collaboration between architecture firm Michael Hsu Office of Architecture and Paltrow herself. Design Milk reports the 92-seat build includes walnut millwork, black-and-white tile, a veined marble wall, and a reeded translucent glass window that obscures the kitchen line — with Paltrow personally weighing in on decisions ranging from marble selections to the dining room's music, according to Design Milk. Paltrow also gave fans a preview of that design process on Instagram, where Goop Kitchen posted sneak peeks of the restaurant and its patio area, per Fox 5 San Diego's report.
A Menu That Finally Gets a Dine-In Upgrade
Sitting down at Goop Kitchen also means access to food that's never been on the menu before. The Del Mar location debuts dine-in-exclusive items, including a Field of Greens salad pizza topped with pesto, garlic confit, mozzarella, parmesan, and arugula, alongside new specialty drinks like a Strawberry-Goji Berry Palmer and Passion Fruit Lemonade, Restaurant Business reports. Those additions sit alongside the brand's usual bowls, wraps, salads, soups, pasta, chicken and salmon entrees, plus staples like ginger tonic shots, blackberry lemon seltzer, cucumber soda and passionfruit guava black tea, according to Fox 5 San Diego. Every dish is still built around Goop Kitchen's signature restrictions — no gluten, seed oils, processed additives, refined sugars or corn — with indoor and outdoor seating available at the new location.
The clean-eating menu is overseen by Vice President of Culinary and Culture Kim Floresca, a Michelin-trained chef whose resume includes stints at El Bulli in Spain, Per Se in New York, and The Restaurant at Meadowood in Napa Valley, per Fine Dining Lovers. Floresca applies those fine-dining techniques to a menu engineered around the same additive-free rules, according to the outlet. Fox 5 San Diego notes the brand describes itself as led by a Michelin-experienced culinary team.
Surf Culture Marketing and a Bigger San Diego Push
To announce its San Diego arrival, Goop Kitchen leaned hard into local coastal identity with a campaign called Now Surfing Serving San Diego, featuring professional surfer Rob Machado, model and surfer Rose Machado, surfer Taylor Knox, and skate collective GRLSWIRL. The campaign, shot on film and Super 8 across local beaches, was detailed by Locally Well. Del Mar is only the opening act — Design Milk reports Goop Kitchen already has plans for additional San Diego County locations in La Jolla and Downtown San Diego, part of a strategy built around the region's health-focused, active-lifestyle demographics.
Fox 5 San Diego reports Goop Kitchen plans to open even more locations following the Del Mar debut, per an announcement from Paltrow. The brand, part of Paltrow's broader Goop lifestyle and wellness empire, already runs three locations in New York City, where every other outpost besides Del Mar still operates as pickup and delivery only.
The Corporate Machine Behind the Wellness Brand
Goop Kitchen was founded in 2021, and behind Paltrow's name sits a joint venture with DFG Ventures, a food business studio led by co-founder and CEO Donald Moore, a 20-year Cheesecake Factory executive, according to Inc. Magazine. DFG Ventures also incubates other celebrity food concepts, including Chrissy Teigen's Cravings, the publication notes. Between its founding and mid-2026, the company processed more than 3 million orders and set a corporate target of reaching 25 total locations nationwide by the end of the year, per Fast Company.
The Del Mar opening reflects a broader industry shift, as fast-casual chains built on ghost kitchens increasingly add physical dining rooms to build brand equity. Circana market data cited by Fast Company found fast-casual foot traffic grew 3% year-over-year, outperforming full-service restaurant traffic, which fell 1%, and traditional quick-service traffic, which stayed flat — a trend the outlet ties to diners favoring premium fast-casual options seen as healthier.
That same pivot toward physical cafes is already underway in Northern California, where Goop Kitchen has signed a lease for a sit-down space at 405 Howard Street in San Francisco's Financial District, as Hoodline reported in its earlier coverage of Goop's FiDi cafe plans. Whether the brand's off-premise efficiency and strict no-gluten, no-seed-oil menu can translate into sustainable unit economics for a full sit-down restaurant remains an open question as Goop Kitchen expands into La Jolla, Downtown San Diego and San Francisco.
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