Organic - to go!

After all that complaining about weekday lunch options, I've found a pretty good one! My co-workers have been telling me to try Organic To Go for at least three months now, and I finally made it over there this week. I love the atmosphere of the downtown D.C. store - very welcoming, fresh and clean, with friendly, smiling staff from the cooks to the cashiers to the managers.

The company was founded in Seattle in 2004 and operates on the idea that people want fresher, more positive alternatives to the usual lunch options. The entire chain is certified USDA Organic, and billed as "the first fast casual café" to obtain that certification. Being certified organic doesn't mean everything they sell is - their criteria are as follows:

"1. Delicious first,
2. Convenience and availability second
3. And organic whenever possible, but at a minimum, our products are always made with natural ingredients free from harmful additives."

From what I can tell, it seems to be a nice mix - I can still buy my chemical-laden Diet Coke, but I can build my own mostly-organic salad before I drink it. They serve breakfast and lunch, and offer various catering options for both meals to local businesses. The café lunch menu offers sandwiches, salads and a DIY salad bar, soups, wraps, quesadillas, pizza and pasta as well as a few sides, and some mix-and-match "lighter side" options. They have both vegan and vegetarian items, and really seem to cover all the bases as far as people's food preferences go.

While I was waiting for my Chicken Pesto Pasta to be cooked (as I stood there and watched!), the manager brought out samples of a butternut squash soup, which was wonderful. If all of their soups are that good, I highly recommend them. The pasta turned out to be delicious - to the point that I finished nearly the entire thing, then spent the afternoon groaning about being full and the evening avoiding the kitchen and anything resembling food.

As a somewhat-obsessive calorie counter (I'm much better than I used to be! Really!), first to limit caloric intake in general and more recently to make sure I was eating enough between marathon training runs, I really wish they had nutrition information on their website, or at least an ingredient list for each menu item. The ingredient list would make it a lot easier to figure out what's organic, what's natural and whether all of the fat content in the pesto is the good kind (from olive oil) or the really bad kind (from pretty much any other kind of oil). The nutrition facts wouldn't really serve any functional purpose, but they would let me obsess a little more easily about just how many calories, exactly, I consumed at lunch.

Overall, I'm a fan, and will definitely head back to try some more of their menu soon! If you live in the Seattle/Bellevue, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Orange County or San Diego areas, check their website for café locations near you. (Their website could use an overhaul, and it takes a minute to find where they list locations, so... From the main site, click on your metro area of choice, then scroll down to the bottom of the page that comes up. You'll see a photo taken outside one of their cafés - click on the orange bar at the bottom of the photo that says "Visit Our Cafes" and it'll pull up a list of locations in your area. Whew!)

Happy organic eating!