CoreLife Eatery (Lexington, KY)

CoreLife Eatery offers grain bowls, wraps, tacos, and more, all made fresh to order with an emphasis on healthy, whole ingredients! We visited their Lexington, Kentucky, location to try out the menu.

By: Alisha Trenalone

I heard a while back that Lexington’s newest shopping center, The Summit at Fritz Farm, included a café with plenty of healthy and gluten-free choices. And it immediately went on my list of restaurants to try!

(The Summit is full of great restaurants. Condado is another favorite!)

CoreLife Eatery, as it turns out, has three locations in Kentucky. It’s quite a new restaurant chain (established 2015) that started in New York and has spread from there.

According to the official website, CoreLife Eatery’s goal has always been to use whole, clean ingredients, including meat that’s sustainably sourced and free of antibiotics and hormones.

That being the case, it was a pleasant surprise to see how affordable the menu is, especially considering the generous portion size! It’s also very easy to customize most items, depending on your personal diet or preferences.

Looking for local Lexington eats? Check out Athenian Grill, Han Woo Ri, Pietana, the Luna food truck, or The Local Taco! And Crank & Boom Ice Cream, European Delights bakery, and La Petit Delicat have amazing desserts.

Building Your Meal at CoreLife Eatery

Most of the space on the menu is devoted to salad or grain bowls, but there are also a few taco options and some hearty sounding broth bowls.

When I visited (spring 2022) nearly all of the regular-size bowls were under $10, and for basically the same price you could actually make it a combo by adding a soup, side or drink.

Want to build your own bowl from the foundation up? You can do that too: just start with your choice of plant-based, chicken, steak, pork, tuna, or tofu, and add ingredients from there.

The tacos can be made in naan bread, a flour tortilla, or a lettuce wrap. I ordered a Greek chicken taco and a steak fajita taco, both on naan, and they were delicious!

The others in my group went for the Steak, Bacon, and Blue Cheese option, but one ordered it as a bowl and one had it as a wrap.

The wrap was massive and very full, but it held together!

There’s a large outdoor dining area, so we headed out to claim a table and enjoyed our fresh food in the fresh air.

Specialty Beverages

One of the most exciting things at CoreLife Eatery was the beverage selection.

The specialty juices, lemonades and teas are provided by Tractor, a company that makes organic drinks for a handful of restaurant chains across the country.

And with all those beautiful colors on display and the ingredients helpfully listed out, they’re all just begging to be sampled. (So I did.)

Beet lemonade, regular lemonade, cranberry cayenne lemonade, mandarin cardamom, fig + vanilla, berry patch haymaker, and hibiscus tea were all lovely in their own way.

But if I had to pick favorites, they’d be the fig + vanilla (it had a honeyed sweetness and just a hint of apple cider vinegar) and the mandarin cardamom.

I’ve already made a return trip to CoreLife Eatery, just a couple weeks after my first visit, and I suspect it will make it into my regular rotation of places to eat in Lexington.

And while, yes, I love seeking out the little independent local restaurants, there’s something to be said for a well-run, dependable chain restaurant too. (Especially when you’re traveling and want a quick meal that’s not just your typical fast food!)

CoreLife Eatery is still a fairly young restaurant chain, so they’re not all over the place. Yet. But there’s enough of them out there that now I’ll be on the lookout for them!