At True Food Kitchen, it’s no to soda, but yes to burgers

True Food Kitchen, the healthy-food focused restaurant from Phoenix-based Fox Restaurant Concepts coming to Mosaic District in Merrifield next month, is all about compromise.

That’s because Fox CEO Sam Fox and his partner in True Food Kitchen, Dr. Andrew Weil, come from very different sides of the food spectrum, Fox explained.

“I come from the bacon cheeseburger world, and Andy comes from the vegan world,” Fox said. “So in order for this to work, we knew there would have to be a sort of a meeting of the minds.” They seem to have worked it out: the Mosaic store will be 10th for the chain, which claims to be one of the early pioneers of the kale movement.

Weil won the battle over soda, for example. True Food Kitchen doesn’t carry soda — except, in cases, a house-made seasonal special — and instead offers a range of “natural refreshments” including “kale-aid” and “the medicine man,” a juice made from pomegranate, blueberry, cranberry and sea buckthorn (It’s a fruit, I checked).

But Fox won on the red meat front.

“I felt if we were really going to appeal to a lot of people, we should offer red meat,” Fox said. “I’m a capitalist. I’m in the restaurant business to make money and promote great things.” The compromise? A bison burger made with grass-fed, organic and hormone-free bison.

The menu does have a large variety of vegetarian and vegan items, however, along with some that are gluten-free. When it opens at Mosaic Sept. 23, the restaurant’s kitchen will be led by Executive Chef Michael Obermeier, who comes to the area from West Palm Beach restaurants The Wine Dive, Roxy’s Pub and Sky 309.

True Food Kitchen at Mosaic will be Fox’s first restaurant in the D.C. area, but it won’t be his last. He’s in talks to do two more locations in the region, one in Bethesda and another in D.C.

Fox operates more than a dozen restaurant concepts, some of them boutique, one-off locations in Arizona, but others — such as Zinburger Wine and Burger Bar ann Sauce Pizza and Wine that have spread further. Eventually, he’d like to bring one or more of the company’s dozen other restaurant concepts here as well, he said.

Read the full story from the Washington Business Journal.
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