Paulius Musteikis
“Fresh. Local. Gluten-free. Healthy. Small Batch.” All the buzzwords.
With that lingo, you might easily mistake the restaurant being described for someplace like Graze, James Beard Award-winning Madison chef Tory Miller’s farm-to-table, “fresh from local pastures” gastropub on the Capitol Square.
It is, however, the tagline for Glaze, a New York City-based chain of eight counter-service teriyaki restaurants — call it a boutique chain — spread across the U.S. from Manhattan to San Francisco, with a location slated to open this spring in Madison.
Glaze is just one of a handful of fast-casual spots that have found Madison an attractive market in recent months — Freshii, Naf Naf Grill, Bowl of Heaven, Forage Kitchen and Freska Mediterranean Grill have all opened within the past year. They share similar concepts, focusing on customizable bowls, salads and wraps, and often freshly squeezed juices and fruit smoothies.
Fresher, healthier eating is coming to fast food in a big way, and we’re not talking about McDonald’s serving more salads. These spots don’t serve burgers; fruits and vegetables are the focus, not a sidelight. “Proteins” — from steak to tofu — are add-ons, not the centerpiece of the dish.
A decade ago, the big hamburger chains began seeing competition from more upscale chains dubbed “fast-casual” — places like Panera Bread, Chipotle and Noodles. Though these spots still had counter service, they offered more attractive decor than the standard burger joint, more customizable dishes and the perception of better-quality ingredients.
Fast-casual continues to gain market share in the restaurant industry, encompassing everything from upscale burgers (think Five Guys, Mooyah) to pizza, but there’s recently been a strong upsurge of fresh and healthy. FastCasual, an industry website, publishes a yearly “Top 100” list of movers and shakers in the fast-casual segment, and it’s full of descriptions not normally associated with chain food. These up-and-comers “source local and organic ingredients from local farmers” (sweetgreen); serve “chef-crafted foods that are grown responsibly and sustainably” (the vegan Native Foods Cafe); are “farm-to-table” and committed to “ingredients with no added hormones or antibiotics” (Modern Market); reduce their food miles to increase flavor (MAD Greens); butcher their own meat (Asian Box); and pick most produce “fresh daily” for “slow food done fast”(Tender Greens).
These restaurants have an array of fresh veggies at the ready. Grain choices from quinoa to black rice. Proteins from free-range organic chicken to goji-chipotle organic tempeh. Staff whip up your salad or bowl in a matter of minutes, usually for less than $10 a meal.
Is this for real?
Best of both worlds
Diners are looking to get the “best of both worlds,” says Craig Thompson, professor of marketing at the UW-Madison business school. They want convenient, fast food that tastes good and is also good for their health.
Thompson, who studies alternative food systems, thinks the rise of healthier fast-casual restaurants is part of an overall backlash against fast food that’s been ongoing for well over a decade, spurred by the publication of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and the release of Morgan Spurlock’s film Super Size Me.
But since these works raised the public’s consciousness, even the way we talk about food has shifted. “Ten or 15 years ago it was all about fat,” Thompson says. He credits food writers like Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman with shifting the emphasis away from counting calories. Now, consumers are more likely to look for food that is fresh and unprocessed.
When customers see their salads, wraps and bowls created right in front of them, it highlights that “this is being freshly prepared,” says Thompson. “This translates into ‘This must be good for me.’”
And what is “good for me,” exactly?
“There’s so much conflicting information out there,” Thompson notes. “Who do you trust? At some point as a consumer, you can’t research every option.”
That’s why consumers are often willing to pay a premium to let a brand — like Whole Foods or Chipotle — do their vetting for them. “Consumers rely on the brand and place faith in that, until proven otherwise,” says Thompson. That’s why Chipotle’s recent incidents nationwide with food-borne illnesses have been so devastating. Sales have plummeted and confidence in the chain is at a low.
At Freshii, the message is as important as the menu.
“I built that”
Making your own meal without having to cook it yourself brings new meaning to the phrase “have it your way.” And it’s fun. A smorgasbord of colorful fruits and veggies are at the ready, to be combined in kaleidoscopic variations. Go slightly southwestern with a rice bowl topped with avocados, black beans and a cilantro lime vinaigrette, or head east with tofu, cabbage, carrots and lemongrass dressing all rolled up in a wrap of kale. Go crazy and add beet slaw, even though it matches neither of these cuisines. Because you love beets. It really is all up to you.
Greater customer control over what’s on the plate is key in today’s dining scene. That’s why choose-your-own assembly line ordering has become so widespread in fast-casual.
Susan Quam, executive vice president of the Wisconsin Restaurant Association, says her group has definitely taken note of the trend.
Consumers aren’t just saying they want healthier options — they’re actually putting their money where their mouths are and acting upon it, says Quam.
“Build-your-own” is clearly on the rise here in Wisconsin, Quam confirms, with sandwiches, wraps, salads, bowls, ramen, even fresher takes on pizza (where customers have been building their own for years) being created at the order counter.
“The build-your-own concept is being driven especially by younger diners, who look at food as an expression of themselves and not just fuel for their bodies,” says Quam. It’s important for them to “be able to choose what’s in their food, even though someone else is making it for them.”
Customization also makes it easier to cope with many diet needs — vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, paleo, raw, low-carb. Several restaurants (Chipotle and Naf Naf, for instance) have dynamic nutrition calculators on their websites. Calories, sodium and grams of fat automatically add up on the right side of the screen as you add options like steak or chicken, tofu, rice, pickles and hummus to your meal.
This extensive info on everything from amounts of saturated fat to cholesterol, sodium, carbs and protein is a hidden benefit to eating at a chain restaurant. It’s unusual for an independent, locally owned restaurant to have this kind of accounting available, although Fit Fresh Cuisine in Fitchburg has been a pioneer in this locally. The six-year-old restaurant lists calories, carbs, fiber, fat and protein for its small menu of açaí bowls, smoothies, scrambles, salads and sandwiches.
But Thompson sees an overall change in customer mindset: These days, people feel less of a need to count calories. “A restaurant like Freshii is saying, ‘We are serving you fresh, healthy food, so you can eat this without worries or guilt,’” says Thompson. And that’s liberating. “The consumer is thinking, ‘I don’t have to worry about rice; rice is natural, I can just eat and relax.’ I think that’s a big part of the promise.”
The bottom line? It’s okay because it’s not a McNugget.
Kathy Humiston, a longtime member at the Willy Street Co-op, penned a history of “hippie food” for the co-op’s Reader back in 2008. Brown rice, tempeh, soy, beans, sprouts — these staples of today’s “bowl” cuisine were introduced in the late 1960s and early ’70s by what were then called “natural food” advocates, reacting against the canned vegetables and Wonder Bread diets of their childhoods.
Once obscure even to those who started the co-op, these ingredients are now close to mainstream. “I love it that whole foods are starting to show up in many different restaurant venues,” says Humiston. “I would love to see this become the new standard.”
Humiston got serious about changing her diet when she became pregnant with her first child in 1983, and like many of her peers, vowed she would raise her children on better food than she ate when she was a kid.
Now that members of that generation are adults, they expect to find better food options when dining out, Humiston notes: “They’ve eaten this way virtually their entire lives. Other stuff doesn’t taste right or have the appeal to them.”
Having grains like quinoa, forbidden rice and brown rice available at chains “opens up new possibilities for more people,” says Humiston. And isn’t that what the hippies were all about?
State Street’s Forage Kitchen prioritizes local sourcing in entrees like the Local Roots salad.
Not a chain
Not every healthy fast-casual restaurant is a chain. State Street’s new Forage Kitchen, which opened last fall, is owned and operated by Henry Aschauer and Doug Hamaker, who also run Roast Public House. The two had the idea for Forage even before they opened Roast in 2012, says Aschauer, but it was more of a challenge to create: “If it were easy, everyone would do it.” A salad- and grain-bowl-based restaurant that tries to source its ingredients locally is a lot easier to do in a place like California, he notes.
Forage “is in tune with how we live our lives these days,” says Aschauer. “Madison is ready for this; we are ready for this as a nation.”
Katie Brozen, chef at Forage Kitchen, created its menu. Brozen attended the health-focused Natural Gourmet Institute culinary school in New York City (its motto is “Kale, quinoa and community since 1977”).
In addition to teaching all the traditional culinary skills, the school goes into sourcing, nutrition and the healthy, healing side of cooking, says Brozen.
After working in restaurants in Manhattan and opening a small vegetarian restaurant in Brooklyn, Brozen moved to Madison to help open Forage. She liked Aschauer and Hamaker’s focus on global inspiration: “I love how other cultures have a better relationship with food than America,” says Brozen.
Build-your-own bowl and salad spots are huge in New York City, and Brozen visited many to “see what they were doing and how they were doing it.” If the mission is to attract people who are just learning how to eat healthy, says Brozen, variety is crucial. “We need to bring those people over to the other side and show them that healthy food doesn’t have to be boring. Or just lettuce.”
Brozen likes to “take an ordinary vegetable and give it its own personality and a ton of flavor.” She spends a lot of her time trying to source as many local products as possible for the restaurant. Wisconsin “has fantastic product, but in the colder months, it has been a challenge,” says Brozen.
One of Forage’s most popular items is the “Power Bowl,” a grain base (brown rice is the default, but it can be made with black rice or quinoa) topped with tender rosemary lentils, sweet potatoes, poblano slaw, jerk chicken, guacamole and a green goddess dressing. It’s creamy and crunchy, sweet and savory, hot and cold — craveable 21st-century comfort food.
“We care about everything that goes into the food, so people get that idea of home,” says Brozen. “It’s a well-cooked meal on the go that’s not just flying at you as fast as possible.”
Thomas Paras, former owner of Amy’s Cafe downtown, has just opened a fast-casual restaurant, Freska Mediterranean Grill, at Greenway Station. He terms it “like a Chipotle, but what I like to serve and the way I like to serve it.” The customizable sandwiches, salads and plates with a variety of toppings and sauces vary in healthfulness, says Paras — “Gyros meat is not diet, but chicken is” — and other add-ons like hummus, babaghanoush and tabouli are healthy. He also points to his “super slaw,” with kale, beets and cabbage.
Paras researched other Mediterranean/Chipotle-style fast-casual restaurants via the Internet before opening Freska. “Everybody’s doing it,” he says. “Probably somebody else is checking me out now.”
Inspiration?
Outright health claims from these restaurants vary, as does the transparency of their sourcing.
A spot like Naf Naf limits itself to describing its fare as “fresh, authentic Middle Eastern food,” while Bowl of Heaven goes more overtly into the health benefits of its signature ingredient, the açaí berry (“twice the antioxidants of blueberries, plus omega fats, amino acids, proteins, anthocyanins, fiber, iron, potassium, phosphorus, calcium and other phytonutrients”).
Other claims from restaurants about being more responsible and sustainable bring up other, more thorny, questions. Has a location of a national chain devoted to sustainable sourcing put a locally owned mom-and-pop restaurant out of business?
Has the sudden, ravenous American quest for healthy quinoa caused environmental damage where the crop is grown in Bolivia and Peru?
And what about some of those processed alternative foods for vegans, like Tofutti cream cheese (which includes partially hydrogenated soy bean oil, maltodextrin, nondairy lactic acid, locust bean, guar and carrageenan gums, vegetable mono and digycerids and potassium sorbet)?
Locally, Forage Kitchen lists some of its purveyors on its website — bread from Batch, tempeh from Milwaukee’s Simple Soyman, goat cheese from Nordic Creamery, cage-free eggs from Lake Mills and sprouts from Supercharge here in Madison. This kind of accountability is easier for a one-location restaurant than it is for a chain with outlets from coast to coast, where getting enough of the same ingredient to create a consistent product from outlet to outlet remains a challenge.
Chef Katie Brozen of Forage Kitchen strives to give vegetables “a ton of flavor.”
Katie Brozen of Forage limits the amount of fat, salt and sugar in her foods. Only extra-virgin olive oil is used in dressings; some are oil-free. “We use pure sweeteners like organic cane sugar, coconut sugar and honey, and sparingly, only to bring the flavors together,” says Brozen. “Same for salt. It’s an essential ingredient that we use to enhance the natural flavors in the vegetables, versus having everything just taste like salt.”
Freshii takes a more inspirational route, with slogans emblazoned across wall-sized blackboards in-store: “Let’s eat without regret. Let’s love kale. Let’s embrace quinoa.... Let’s eat things that make us feel good.” Sourcing is not specified.
Is this food always healthy? It’s certainly possible to pile on enough dressings, cheeses, rice, pita sides and guacamole to rack up a considerable number of calories, but even so, grains and fresh vegetables are going to be healthier than processed and fried foods.
Craig Thompson is doubtful, however, about some of the more specific health claims for certain ingredients. From a marketing standpoint, he says, “Some of these chains are benefiting from the hype around alternative diets and the quest for magic-bullet solutions to what ails us as a society.”
And there are differing opinions on what constitutes a healthy diet. “Some people claim there are tremendous health benefits [to an açaí berry];” says Thompson. “Others will say, that’s just an expensive blueberry.”
Is Dane County full?
Madison, with its college population and growing millennial workforce, does have a demographic desirable for chains like Freshii and other vegetable-centric leaders like Lyfe Kitchen, sweetgrass and Native Foods. But Susan Quam of the Wisconsin Restaurant Association says that such chains would look not only at our demographics but at how many restaurants we already have. And Dane County is very dense.
Plus, the location needs to be just right, one that younger diners want to be in and can get to easily. “They all want to have the best spaces available,” says Quam.
Still, as people dine out more frequently (in April of 2015, the U.S. Dept. of Commerce reported that for the first time ever, Americans spent more money eating out than they did at grocery stores), diners are likely to continue to want more healthy options across the eating spectrum and even more customizability. And they’re going to continue to want to eat these on the run or bring them home for easy post-work dinners.
“That’s not going away,” says Quam.
The latest in fast and healthy
Bowl of Heaven
717 Hilldale Court
The star is açaí bowls and smoothies. Açaí bowls are more or less smoothies served in a bowl, composed of a blend of fruits like açaí berries, strawberries, pineapple, blueberries and banana, and even fresh kale and spinach, topped with organic hemp flax, granola and honey. Served icy cold, they’re better that way. Fresh juices, too, are made to order.
Unique ingredients: MAQ7, a blend of the maqui berry, the gac fruit and five others you’ve never heard of; purple corn
Forage Kitchen
665 State St.
Salads and grain bowls form the heart of the menu. A dozen pre-designed salads and two pre-designed bowls are on the chalkboard, or have the staff build your own from a wide variety of veggies and other add-ons. Small dining area; there is a lot of take-out. Açaí bowls; fresh fruit/veggie juices made on site but pre-bottled at the counter.
Unique ingredients: citrus-marinated fennel, goji-chipotle organic tempeh, black (“forbidden”) rice
Freshii
422 Gammon Place
Freshii has a large menu of salads, wraps, grain bowls, soups, burritos and juices. Customers can also create their own by checking off options on a printed ticket; then counter staff will make it up. This speeds up the assembly line process (there’s no last-minute indecision, or “what’s that?” conversations with the staff) and makes pricing and extras completely clear. You can also sign up for a juice cleanse program. Juices are made-to-order.
Unique ingredients: turkey carnitas, spicy lemongrass, mango
Freska Mediterranean Grill
8310 Greenway Blvd., Middleton
Build-your-own pita sandwiches, rice plates, salads and platters, plus four soups.
Unique ingredients: lamb, marinated pork, babaghanoush, couscous, tabouleh, roasted pepper aioli, harissa sauce
Naf Naf Mediterranean Grill
555 State St.
Build-your-own pita sandwiches, rice bowls, salads.
Unique ingredients: steak shawarma, sumac onions, s’khug sauce, basmati rice
