On Monday, the hottest day of the year (until Tuesday), my friend and I wanted a dinner that felt light and, to the extent solid and savory food can be, refreshing. Good thing Sweetgreen had opened the week before.
Specializing in plant-forward bowls, salads and “protein plates,” Sweetgreen is a “fast food” chain with hundreds of locations across the country. But the concept is more like Chipotle than McDonald’s, with an emphasis on “real food” “cook[ed] from scratch” and a stated mission to balance business and environmental sustainability.
What seems totally unique about Sweetgreen is the way it offers unlimited customization across dozens of elements—greens and grains, veggies and proteins, dressings and seasonings, all of them quickly interchangeable via an online (or, in person, touchscreen) ordering system that updates your price as applicable. Customization includes up to three portions of dressing, which can be served on the side or mixed in, with no apparent effect on price.
Wanting a more default experience for the sake of this review, I ordered the Shroomami bowl ($13.95) with nothing subbed in or out. That meant wild rice, shredded fresh kale and red cabbage, cucumber, zesty seasoned tofu, crunchy toasted almond shards and warm, earthy, juicy baby bello mushrooms, all tossed in a sweet, savory, slowly spicy miso sesame ginger dressing. Peeling the lid off my compostable “Hex Bowl” (a literal Sweetgreen trademark), I found most of the dish’s components buried within a forest of the kale, not arrayed in photogenic segments as they presumably would have been had I ordered my dressing on the side. But a little digging turned everything up. The raw ingredients were fresh and the cooked items well-executed, though I’ll probably go heavier than the default with the dressing next time.
My companion ordered the Cucumber Kimchi Crunch salad ($11.75), which thrilled her from first bite with an intensely sweet, spicy, acidic, funky, savory experience spread across five grades of crunch, all wisely balanced by the creamy, alkaline add-on of half an avocado ($2.25 extra). Also not very photogenic, the dish was a rumpled tangle of crisp romaine and spring mix (whose spinach was the only item that didn’t look quite fresh), spicy broccoli and tender sweet potato, pickled-pink cabbage and fried onions and, of course, cucumber, possibly marinated, all whorled up with an apple kimchi sauce and a Korean-style barbecue glaze.
It was a tsunami of flavor, while the Shroomami, ironically, was much subtler. I could see myself favoring the former one day and the latter the next, but on this day, the shocking maximalism and even more shocking cohesiveness of the Cucumber Kimchi Crunch earned the nod from both of us.
More shocking still? As we departed this fast food place, we both felt full and content—not bloated, weighed down or, therefore, worried about hidden unhealthy ingredients. “When we were in school,” the founders say on Sweetgreen’s website, “there were two choices: food that was slow, expensive, and fresh—or fast, cheap, and unhealthy.” Sweetgreen exists to find a third way, they say, and a week in, Sweetgreen New Haven seems on course.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims.
