Last week saw the selection of midday nibbles and lunchtime snacks on offer around the Downtown/Mid-City merge increase by one worthy addition, with the official opening of Health Nut at the Lincoln Blvd and Broadway intersection.
A small-but steadily growing family business, Health Nut began way back in 1988 primarily as a vitamin store and over time developed into a restaurant offering super healthy salads.
"In the back there was a tiny deli with a counter, probably three or four tables at most, selling salads and sandwiches. So my parents purchased the business, my mom took over the kitchen part of it, my dad took over the vitamin part of it," explained Health Nut CEO Steve Choi.
Now, some three decades later, Choi has been able to open five outlets, including Woodland Hills, Sherman Oaks, Manhattan Beach, Culver City and now Santa Monica.
According to Choi, fresh ingredients are sourced locally as much as possible and great care is taken to ensure the lettuce remains fresh, even the next day. Moreover, the chicken is cooked with no oil, butter or fat and a myriad of vegan, vegetarian and gluten free options are also available, together with several drool-inducing choices of dressing.
In fact, the dressings are so popular that Choi has started to sell those separately as well. "We launched a national retail campaign for four of our top selling dressing flavors. And we’re in every Walmart in the country. We’re also in a lot of the regional stores, Target, Bristol Farms, Gelson’s, Stater Brothers, Albertsons and that started around two months ago," he said.
"Salad is salad at the end of the day. Right? Chicken is chicken and lettuce is lettuce but as fresh as it can be, if your dressings aren’t up to par, it’s not going to taste good," Choi said, adding, "My mom created five fundamental flavors that I think are different enough that you could apply them to almost anything, but they’re all so uniquely good. For instance, our spicy Asian dressing, which is quickly becoming our most popular."
Choi (44) himself is born and bred in the Los Angeles area having grown up in the Koreatown district after his parents moved to the US. He went on to study business at Berkeley and UCLA.
The site at 1447 Lincoln Blvd is close to other outlets selling alternative daytime provisions like Jersey Mike’s, La Purépecha and Bay Cities Italian Deli and with all of the construction going, Health Nut is poised to be in the right place at the right time, a year or so from now..
However, the store was actually supposed to open in the spring of 2023 and anyone wandering past will have almost certainly seen posters on wooden boarding surrounding the site, which was formerly a Starbucks. That got pushed back to the summer of 2023, then the spring of 2024 and now, finally the summer.
"We had issues related both to the city and the construction process. There are some issues with the architect upfront, but that also had to do a lot with what the city was requiring and us wanting to get through permits in an expedited fashion," Choi said, adding, "So there’s a lot of things that I think could have gone better from the very get-go. But a lot of that has to do with trying to navigate the city of Santa Monica. And it’s tricky because they’re their own jurisdiction.
"We’ve been told multiple times that, ‘I know you’ve been delayed, so has everyone else, but we have 26 other projects ahead of you. And so you just have to wait.’ And because they’re short staffed, we’re at the whim of their schedule of the inspectors that would get assigned to us," Choi said.
"So if they were a no-show for whatever reason, if they went on vacation for example, there were no backups, there were no alternatives. We just had to wait. And so especially toward the back end of the process when construction was done and we’re just waiting for inspection to happen, there were quite a bit of delays just because of that," he added.
"We just couldn’t wait to open and we’re so grateful that we finally were able to," said Choi.
The menu at Health Nut includes salads, sandwiches, soups and more inbetween. It’s located on the northeast corner of the Broadway and Lincoln Blvd intersection and is open Mon-Sat 10am to 8pm, but closed on Sundays. Check out the menu at healthnutla.com.
