By Elena Kadvany
E-mail Elena Kadvany
About this blog: I am a perpetually hungry twenty-something journalist, born and raised in Menlo Park and currently working at the Palo Alto Weekly as education and youth staff writer. I graduated from USC with a major in Spanish and a minor in jo...
(More)About this blog: I am a perpetually hungry twenty-something journalist, born and raised in Menlo Park and currently working at the Palo Alto Weekly as education and youth staff writer. I graduated from USC with a major in Spanish and a minor in journalism. Though my first love is journalism, food is a close second. I am constantly on the lookout for new restaurants to try, building an ever-expanding "to eat" list. As a journalist, I'm always trolling news sources and social media websites with an eye for local food news, from restaurant openings and closings to emerging food trends. When I was a teenager growing up in Menlo Park, I always drove up to the city on weekends with the singular purpose of finding a better meal than I could at home. But in the past year or so, the Peninsula's food culture has been totally transformed, with many new restaurants opening and a continuous stream of San Francisco restaurants coming south to open Peninsula outposts. Don't navigate this food boom hungry and alone! Feed me your tips on new chefs and eats and together we'll share them with the broader community.
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Healthy fast-casual chain Sweetgreen will open a new outpost in downtown Mountain View this Thursday, June 1.
Sweetgreen will open at 440 Castro St. The restaurant took over half of a space most recently occupied by Mixx, which
closed in 2015.
At Sweetgreen, customers can take their pick from signature salads, seasonal combinations or create their own. (View the current Bay Area menu
here.)
Sweetgreen uses a fast-casual model to serve locally sourced salads, grain bowls and other dishes. Photo courtesy Sweetgreen.
Because the company views itself as a "critical link between growers and consumers" with a "responsibility to protect the future of real food," Sweetgreen sources its ingredients from local small and mid-sized farms and companies, its website states. Each location has a
large blackboard that lists individual ingredients and the specific farm they came from.
Sweetgreen also makes an effort to support the communities it operates in, including by donating opening-day proceeds for new locations to local organizations. For Mountain View, proceeds will go to East Palo Alto nonprofit Collective Roots, which supports local gardens, farmers markets and other healthy eating efforts. The nonprofit's "ethos of cultivating a healthier, stronger, more connected community aligns with that of Sweetgreen's," the company said.
The restaurant will open at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday.
This will be the ninth California location for the East Coast-born Sweetgreen, following a Palo Alto outpost that
opened last May. The company was founded in Washington, D.C. in 2007, and now operates more than 60 locations across the United States.
