With no fanfare—and not a hint of brand connection to the mothership—Chipotle Mexican Grill began testing an all-new concept in Santa Monica this week.
Farmesa Fresh Eatery offers an abbreviated selection of healthful, made-to-order bowls. It’s a menu that will appeal to fans of Sweetgreen, Tender Greens or Dig. There are no tacos or burritos in sight, and no salsa or guac—though the menu is starting out small and will likely evolve, said Nate Lawton, Chipotle’s vice president of new ventures.
Perhaps most interesting about this test is the fact that consumers will not be able to walk into Farmesa. There is no consumer-facing makeline, just some elegant signage on a brick wall and glass windows that offer the potential for a peek into the kitchen, should they decide to uncover the glass.
Farmesa is on the second floor of a ghost kitchen, with no consumer-facing makeline. / Photo by Lisa Jennings
The concept is being tested in a new Kitchen United Mix, a food hall and ghost kitchen with about 15 brands, including a craft beer-focused bar. It’s the 18th location for Kitchen United, which was born in nearby Pasadena, Calif., and now has units across the country.
As at other locations, guests at the new food hall order digitally through the Kitchen United website or app, or via kiosk if they're on site. They can also order through third-party platforms for delivery.
To-go orders, which can be mix-and-matched across brands, are picked up from manned shelves at the food hall entrance. There is a limited amount of dine-in, including a small patio and a charming second-floor balcony overlooking the shopping promenade just blocks from the ocean.
For Lawton, opening in a Kitchen United venue offered a lower-cost opportunity to put Farmesa through Chipotle’s rigorous testing system, which the company calls stage-gate.
In this case, Kitchen United handles operational details like expediting, ordering technology and payment collection, for example, leaving Chipotle to focus on the food.
“We’re only focused on the kitchen, which gives us the opportunity to really dial in on the culinary and menu that we think is going to best deliver on the Farmesa promise,” said Lawton. “This is a much faster path to learning, and it presented the right type of learning that we wanted for the stage we were in on this concept.” Delivery is also expected to be a huge component. Lawton noted that the Santa Monica market has a delivery rate more than nine times the national average, which is one reason the company wanted to test it there. And Kitchen United is designed to facilitate delivery. DoorDash or Uber Eats drivers can pull up to a back door in an alley, and runners bring out their orders. For customers within about a mile of the food hall, Kitchen United offers a fleet of delivery robots. Farmesa’s future It’s too soon to say where Farmesa might go from here, or even what it might look like. Chipotle will certainly consider the brand’s potential as a brick-and-mortar or standalone concept, as well as its ability to grow in food halls like Kitchen United or other nontraditional sites, Lawton said. “It would be getting a bit ahead of ourselves to define that before we have the learning, which is the entire purpose of why we’re here,” he said. This is the first new concept Chipotle has developed and launched under CEO Brian Niccol, who joined the Newport Beach, Calif.-based company in 2018, not long after a two-year foodborne illness crisis spurred the exodus of founder Steve Ells and others in top management. Niccol picked up the ball and ran with some initiatives Chipotle had begun tinkering with before he arrived, like the development of drive-thru lanes, which are now a feature of about 80% of new openings. He also continued a massive investment in the digital side of the business that proved invaluable during the pandemic. The previous administration had also attempted new concepts. Founder Steve Ells for years argued that the fast-casual model that Chipotle perfected—with guests walking the line to build their meal from fresh ingredients—could be recreated with other cuisines. That was the model for ShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen, which launched in 2011 and grew to 15 units, before being hastily shuttered in 2017. A burger concept called Tasty Made was also attempted briefly, but never moved beyond one unit. The only non-Chipotle brand that remains of that era is Pizzeria Locale, a concept developed by Colorado fine- dining chefs Bobby Stuckey and Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson, which was a strategic investment. And it’s one that may grow. Late last year, the company opened a fifth unit of Pizzeria Locale in Denver. The smaller-footprint location is more focused on delivery and takeout. “It’s a concept we’re still learning from,” said Lawton. It’s not Chipotle Pizzeria Locale and Farmesa are now the two concepts under Lawton’s small New Ventures division. From the motherbrand of Chipotle, Farmesa borrows guiding principles: a focus on fresh ingredients and food with integrity, along with the mission of cultivating a better world. But Lawton is not necessarily looking to recreate the Chipotle model, he said. “The strategy we’re pursuing is both developing and designing—as well as investing in—new cuisine spaces, new culinary spaces, outside the Mexican grill,” he said. “One of the things that we didn’t want to assume was that the model had to be 100% exactly as Chipotle is today.” Lawton said the company went to consumers to determine what they were interested in eating. “We did a lot of benchmarking and understanding and interviewing, and we found this fresh eatery space to be really exciting,” he said. Farmesa was developed in about six months, he said. The focus is on “really awesome culinary,” and its name combines “farm” with “mesa,” or table in Spanish. “It’s our version of the farmer’s table,” he said. The menu was developed by James Beard Award-winning chef Nate Appleman, who was literally in the kitchen for the soft opening this week. Appleman was named the James Beard Foundation’s Rising Star Chef of the Year in 2019 for his work at the San Francisco restaurant A16, and also designed the menu for ShopHouse, which had a similar emphasis on bold and bright flavors. On offer at Farmesa the first week were just a few options for guests to build their own bowls: an Ora King salmon filet topped with everything bagel seasoning could be paired with roasted broccoli or sprouted cauliflower, for example, or marinated roasted golden beets. Other protein options included grilled chicken or slices of tri-tip beef. On the side were fried purple sweet potato chips and condiments that included a velvety avocado hummus and a bright green, vibrant herb sauce in the style of a chimichurri. Rice and corn recipes are borrowed from Chipotle, Appleman said, but the menu crossover stops there. Farmesa includes healthful grain options like red jasmine rice and quinoa, not found at Chipotle. Los Angeles is a town with many options for meals in a bowl, but Appleman said Farmesa attempts to differentiate. He made a conscious choice to offer a “shallow bowl” with quality ingredients, for example, not one overloaded with “cheap stuff,” which is common among bowl concepts. “I made this for someone like me,” he said. “Someone who wants to eat healthy, who likes to work out and has tons of energy. It gives you everything you need for that.” Parsing price During opening week, Farmesa’s lunch bowls were priced from about $11.95 to $16.95, though pricing is one of the aspects being tested and that could change, Lawton said. A lunch of a salmon bowl with three vegetables and herb sauce, a generous bag of purple sweet potato chips and avocado hummus dip, and a bottled water, was $33.25 with tax and a 15% tip (and, yes, the kiosk asks for a tip, though it's optional). It was easily enough for two light eaters. A similar bowl with salmon, water and a roasted potato side dish at a Sweetgreen around the corner from the concept would be roughly $28 with the same tip applied. Farmesa’s 337-square-foot kitchen has been equipped with the standard equipment that can be found in a Chipotle, but also with new tools that set up Farmesa for evolution. “One of the great things about this kitchen is we’ve designed it in such a way where we actually have some equipment that we’re going to learn on delivering the menu, or could actually deliver on future innovation,” Lawton said. “The equipment we have in the kitchen goes kind of beyond what you might need to deliver on our menu.” Still under the radar Since Chipotle first began exploring new restaurant concepts like ShopHouse, the world has changed. ShopHouse could be explained simply: It’s like Chipotle, but Asian. Guests could walk into a restaurant and see, smell and taste. For Farmesa, the challenge now is to create awareness for a “fresh eatery” brand with no storefront and no real marketing push, at least not yet. So far, the social media effort has been minimal. It’s not clear whether the company will tap its rich database of Chipotle fans, or its 31.6 million loyalty members. With menu prices climbing over the past year, the mothership has seen some lower-income diners trade down and move away from delivery, with its premium pricing. Higher-income guests, however, are dining at Chipotle even more than ever, which bodes well for a potentially upper-end brand like Farmesa. The 3,187-unit Chipotle, meanwhile, is pushing forward with growth, with plans to reach 7,000 units across North America. New ventures remain just a tiny part of the company’s efforts right now, Lawton said. And, like the concepts that might be tested, the future of the division itself will be defined by learnings along the way. “A big thing that you’ll hear from me,” said Lawton, “is that, in a new ventures/new concept space, it’s really important to get a lot of upfront learning so that informs the right ways to move forward.”
Kitchen United's delivery bots stand at the ready. / Photo by Lisa Jennings
Farmesa attempts to differentiate its bowls from others in the marketplace. / Photo courtesy of Farmesa