Here's what it's like to eat at Cava, the salad chain plotting rapid expansion across the US

Cava's Mediterranean-inspired menu includes harissa honey chicken, braised lamb, spiced feta, and red pepper hummus.

• Cava is plotting an ambitious expansion across the US. It opened 72 restaurants last year.
• I visited the Mediterranean salad chain's first Chicago restaurant and had to wait for an hour to order.
• But the ingredients were very flavorful and there was a lot of choice. Here's what my experience was like.

Cava, the Mediterranean build-your-own-bowl chain, is plotting an ambitious expansion across the US.

It opened 72 net new restaurants in fiscal 2023 and expects to open at least 50 in 2024. About 90% of new openings will be in suburban areas, away from the traditional office hubs you might associate with chains like Cava that sell quick, healthy lunches ideal for desk-workers.

At the start of 2022, Cava had 164 restaurants. As of 21 April, 2024, it had 323 restaurants, including the conversion of many Zoës Kitchen locations.

I visited one of Cava's restaurants to see what the hype was about.

I visited Chicago's first Cava restaurant, which opened in Wicker Park in April. Though it had already been open for three weeks by the time I visited, there was a huge line. And this was on a Friday night at 8 p.m. — not exactly when I'd expect to be peak salad time.

Cava had been doing a good job of creating a buzz, with ads for the restaurant plastered all over the local Metra station.

It had worked well: It took me an hour to get to the front of the line. None of the other customers I spoke to knew why the restaurant was quite so popular, other than that it was new.

William Blair analyst Sharon Zackfia joked during Cava's earnings call in May that you need a Disneyland-style fast pass to get into the restaurant.

A handful of people had cottoned on to the fact that they could place online orders to avoid standing in line for so long. They downloaded the app, placed their orders, left, and came back half an hour later — much quicker than the hour I spent standing in line.

Since 2015, Cava's restaurants have had dedicated production lines for pickup and delivery orders, which made up about 37% of sales in Q1, Cava told Business Insider.

Cava has a walk-the-line format like Chipotle. Customized grain bowls, salads, and pitas make up roughly 85% of Cava's orders, CEO Brett Schulman told BI in May. You can also get "curated" dishes — Schulman said that its most popular is the harissa avocado bowl.

You can choose greens or carbs as the base of your bowl. I opted for the SuperGreens base, which included raw kale and Brussels sprouts. Other base options include saffron basmati rice, black lentils, and spinach.

Then came the dips, which surprisingly were layered between the base and the "main." You can choose up to three of the six Mediterranean dips on offer, served with what were essentially ice-cream scoops, and I went for hummus and the roasted eggplant dip. A sign explained to customers what the dips were from in case they were unfamiliar with Harissa, hummus, or Cava's spiced "Crazy Feta."

Then came the mains. Some of these incur extra charges, so you must be careful with what you pick — like the harissa honey chicken, braised lamb, and spicy lamb meatballs. When I visited, falafel, roasted vegetables, grilled chicken, and roasted white sweet potato — four of the seven mains on offer — didn't cost extra.

I opted for half-and-half portions of sweet potato and falafel for my main and topped them with black olives, pickled pink onion, cabbage slaw, and garlic dressing, all of which were free. Cava is also well-known for its pita chips and crisps, the latter of which you can add to your bowl for free.

Because I didn't get any of the paid-for extras, I was just charged the base price of $12.05 before tax. With a drink, it came to $17.22 including tax.

My bowl looked monstrous. It tasted great, though. The white sweet potato wasn't as soft as I'd expected, and the pita chips soon became very soggy from the dressing, but other than that I loved my bowl. The ingredients all tasted fresh and were full of flavor.

Building my own bowl was fun. Everything was full of flavor, and there was plenty of choice of Mediterranean ingredients for meat-eaters and veggies alike. The 30-seat restaurant was so busy that I had to share a table, and the diner sat opposite me told me he'd relocated to Chicago from another state and had been excited to finally see one open in the Windy City.

The Chicago restaurant — Cava's entry into the upper Midwest — "is delivering exceptional results and generating significant buzz," Schulman told investors in May. I wouldn't wait in line for an hour for a Cava bowl again, but I left feeling very full — and pumped full of vitamins.