Sweetgreen

When you need a fast meal option at a good price but without the guilt of extra calories and derailing your diet, head to Sweet Green. Great salads, healthy options, and the yogurt is amazing! Finally, a healthy fast food place! Pros: Delicious healthy options for a quick bite Cons: Limited seating more

I'm not one to normally crave salad or even order one when I'm eating out, but Sweetgreen is great for when you need something light, healthy, and tasty. They offer an array of salads made in front of you (or you can make up your own combo of ingredients if you want). Their frozen yogurt is nice and tangy and you can get it with a number of toppings, from fruit to coconut to chocolate chips. There have been times when my salad became a bit wet and soggy due to an excess of dressing and on another occasion the little pieces of pears in my salad were a bit brown (I guess they had been left out too long and started oxidizing). Little things, but if they put you off then just be specific about how much dressing you want or if you don't want a certain ingredient in your salad. But overal, Sweetgreen is great for getting a good bite to eat without feeling too full afterward. Pros: good froyo, healthy food Cons: sometimes soggy salad more

While I go to Sweetgreen for their Fro-yo more often than their salads, everything about this place it great! First off they actually are GREEN - they use local produce, encourage recycling, use recycled utensils, etc! Second, they use what's in season, so the produce rotates (which encourages moi to play around with my usual fro-yo toppings). And finally, they are locally owned (holler DC!)! Try one of their many DC locations, and get your (sweet)green on! Pros: fresh produce, happy & helpful staff Cons: so small! more

Good to Go The food media jumped on the story of Sweetgreen even before it opened. And no wonder. It made a great headline: Savvy Georgetown Grads Open Salad Takeout to Feed Hunger for Healthy Food. But could three 22-year-olds, just three months out of college, actually deliver? So far, so good. Sweetgreen opened Aug. 1 in the cozy space that used to house the Little Tavern hamburger shop on M Street. And the quality of the ingredients -- 30 percent organic and growing -- already has the office crowd and the college kids lining up to squeeze into the shiny, eco-chic space. On the menu are very fresh, made-to-order salads, wraps and a deliciously tart homemade frozen yogurt. For $6 you can choose from organic mesclun, spinach, romaine or baby arugula, then add three of 37 toppings, plus one "crunch," which includes items such as toasted almonds, sunflower seeds and wasabi peas. It would be easy to add more -- though that will cost you extra -- but you don't need to. We were pleasantly satisfied with our mix of baby arugula, kalamata olives, roasted peppers and feta with Sweetgreen's homemade hummus lemon tahini dressing. If all that seems too complicated, the "chef crafted" salads ($9) are enticing, too. The Guacamole Greens, advertised as a "deconstructed" guacamole, is faddish in concept but delicious in practice: It tosses mesclun with avocado, cilantro, candy-sweet grape tomatoes, red onion and crushed tortilla chips and tops it with homemade cilantro-lime dressing with a subtle jalapeno kick. Le Parisien offers up roasted turkey, brie, pears, toasted almonds and champagne vinaigrette, a wonderful combination (though we would have preferred real turkey meat to the deli-processed stuff.) The frozen yogurt (small, $4; large, $6; both with three toppings), however, might be what really wins over crowds. It's unflavored and has the delightful tang of real yogurt -- which is what it is. The founders spent six months developing the recipe, which includes nonfat yogurt, skim milk, lemon juice and a tiny bit of sugar. Even better, it's only 18 calories an ounce, a sign that Sweetgreen's team has already delivered on its promise of fast, healthful food to go. -- Jane Black (Sept. 5, 2007) more