Clean Market, A Cool Place to Heat Up and Unwind
The wellness center offers cryotherapy, infrared saunas, IV drips, and a holistic cafe and products.
BY KRISTEN TAUER
In between their lunching and hair appointments, Upper East Side denizens now have a onestop-shop for all their clean living essentials — and yes, that includes an IV drip.
Clean Market, an upscale holistic wellness center from Clean Food Dirty City blogger Lily Kunin, aims to become a destination for those looking to unwind and heal through functional food and today’s most popular wellness treatments.
“I’ve been building my own business for a couple of years when the opportunity for Clean Market came up,” says Kunin of the space, which offers cryotherapy, infrared saunas, IV drips, a cafe and marketplace. “I’d been living in L.A. for the last year, and I felt like New York had such a need for a space where it can be just an oasis to take care of yourself.”
Her foray into functional healing began 10 years ago while she was working full time in education and trying to navigate her own sickness.
“I had done everything like conventional medicine, holistic, acupuncture. And nothing felt good until I gave up gluten,” she says. “I grew up with chefs in my family, so I’ve always been around food, and so I started to marry wellness and food.” She went back to school to study conventional medicine and started a blog on the side, Clean Food Dirty City, which started to snowball as she began posting content on Instagram, which led to a book deal.
“It was such a different time on Instagram then. Now I don’t know if you can do the same thing, really. When I started my Instagram it wasn’t really a thing,” she says. “It ended up being perfect timing. I wrote my cookbook, left education, and then started working for Parsley Health in functional medicine. That was my crash course in functional medicine, learning about supplements, shadowing doctors and health coaches.”
Everything offered at Clean Market maps back to the seven pillars of functional medicine: energy, flow, detox, brain, community, beauty, and gut health. A market set up in the front of the shop sells a mix of clean beauty and skin products and apothecary-style items, and Kunin notes that all of the supplements sold have clinical testing behind them. “They essentially are what they say they are,” she adds.
A cafe-style functional food and tonic bar is set up in the middle of the space, serving lattes in partnership with Moon Juice and Counter Culture coffee as well as superfood smoothies and bowls and power shoots, all crafted around the idea of boosting energy, increasing brain function, or reducing stress. (Ingredients range from aloe water and turmeric to CBD, chlorophyll, bee pollen, and Lypo-Spheric B12, not to mention more standard fare like kale, banana, coconut and strawberry.) A thermo lounge offering infrared saunas and cryotherapy treatments is tucked away in the back of the space along with a Vitamin IV drop lounge, which includes private rooms for guests to lounge while they are hooked up. (And for those on the fence: the NutriDrip services are performed by licensed nurses.)
Clean Market has like-minded neighbors, and not by accident: one of Clean Market’s investors owns the building, which includes fellow tenants Skin Laundry, Equinox and SoulCycle. “I think it just makes sense to be plugged into this health and wellness community,” Kunin says of the location. “We’re really seeing it as a partnership community hub rather than competitive in any way.”
At Clean Market, the mentality boils down to a similar interconnectedness, which also recognizes the importance of conventional Western medicine. “I definitely am an advocate for focusing on medication when it’s appropriate and necessary,” Kunin says. “And combining it with the amazing services and supplements here that are natural.”