About Restaurant Openings Around DC
A guide to the newest places to eat and drink.
Hard as it might be to believe now, it was hard to find an affordable place to sit down and eat a veggie-forward meal in Manhattan in 2003.
Enter Westville, a casual table-service in the West Village. It excelled in brunch, offered a “vegetable market” menu with two dozen different veggie sides, and beat the fast-casual bowl trend to the punch by about a decade. And it soon spread all over New York.
Until recently though, owner Jay Strauss had never considered expanding Westville beyond the tri-state area. On July 14, he’ll open a new location in Clarendon at the Crossing Clarendon development.
If it works—and Strauss thinks it will, since Westville’s blend of veggies and burgers has broad appeal by design—more DMV locations will follow, and Westville will likely expand to other cities, too.
“I believed for a long time that Westville is a New York City thing, whatever that means,” Strauss says. “But you have to be open to evolving and growing.”
Though Westville was something new and trendy when it opened 20 years ago, today its menu reads as basic 21st century American cuisine. Everywhere from New York to Nebraska has farm-to-table places like it. Sweet potato fries, grilled chicken-avocado cobb salad, grilled salmon plates, buttermilk fried chicken sandwiches, turkey burgers, and sides like asparagus with parmesan, beets with goat cheese, and hash browns with chipotle mayo.
“We like simple preparations,” Strauss says. “We could probably teach the average cook to do a lot of what we do pretty quickly.”
Westvilles are open daily for lunch and dinner, plus weekend brunch. Though they do a big lunch delivery business, service in the restaurant isn’t fast-casual—servers take your order at the table, and there’s a full bar. There are seasonal specials, which are the same across every Westville location in New York— and that’s likely to extend to the Arlington location, Strauss says.
Since the Westville signage went up in Clarendon, Strauss says, he’s been approached by several excited former New Yorkers, including one who said he’d been a regular at the original West Village location in the early aughts.
“It’s a really touching thing to hear that,” Strauss says. “I’m so far from home I’m not even quite sure where I am, and people are walking in telling me they remember me running around that 18-seat restaurant 20 years ago.”
