About DC Restaurant Openings
A guide to the newest places to eat and drink.
DC was ground zero for the kind of fast casual “slop bowl” dining that has become synonymous with quick, healthy lunches in urban business districts around the country. Cava was born here. So was Sweetgreen.
Nearly 300 locations later, Sweetgreen is trying something new in this area: a drive-through for its salads and Harvest Bowls. On August 20, a new Sweetgreen in McLean became the first in the region to get a “Sweetlane.”
The chain is trying to adapt its model for a more car-dependent suburban audience— especially since the majority of Sweetgreens are now in the suburbs, not city centers, according to co-founder Nicolas Jammet.
Don’t come expecting to order through an intercom like you might at McDonald’s. This is essentially a mobile pickup system: place your order online, pull into the drive-through, and get your bowl handed to you through a window.
Sweetgreen already has Sweetlanes at three locations. The first opened outside Chicago in 2022; two others opened last year in Orange County, California.
The McLean store opened in January, and Sweetgreen felt the market was ripe for the first East Coast drive-through.
“Obviously we started in DC, that’s where our roots are, and it has been in more office-oriented environments,” says Ryan Slemons, Sweetgreen’s chief development officer. “But we’re looking to expand the Sweetgreen brand to more communities around the country, and McLean is a great natural fit for our next chapter.”
Ike Allen covers politics, food, culture, and transportation in DC and writes the monthly Hidden Eats column for the magazine. He grew up in DC.
