Forecasts show cooling enthusiasm for lunch bowls

Americans are increasingly over the “slop bowl.”

- BY REDD BROWN AND DINA KATGARA

CHIPOTLE'S burrito bowl was once a hit, but the chain finds itself in a slump.

(Smith Collection / Gado)

Chipotle, Sweetgreen and Cava — once stars of the restaurant industry — are struggling as diners tire of pick-your-own ingredients piled atop rice or greens. Instead, lunchgoers are choosing offerings with more texture, like sandwiches and tacos, that fill them up and often cost less.

Even Steve Ells, the founder of Chipotle and the burrito bowl that rocketed the chain to lunchtime fame, has moved on. At a Manhattan location of his new concept Counter Service, there’s a red neon sign depicting a lunch bowl with a slash through it. It’s a bowl-free zone, reinforced by a website that proclaims “we love sandwiches” and “anything, as long as it can go on bread.”

“We've gone back to handheld,” said Ells, who left Chipotle in 2020. That came more than 15 years after debuting a bowl in response to customers opening up their burritos and asking for a fork. The bowl quickly became the chain’s top-selling menu item and spawned a boom that led to chains such as Cava and Sweetgreen.

Ells said the shift to bowls in 2003 lifted the Chipotle experience and helped broaden its appeal by serving “super premium quality food in a form that didn’t appear like fast food to folks.” Now to stand out, he says Counter Service is “offering sandwiches that are elevated in a lot of ways.” (One of its sandwiches, priced at nearly $16, features dry-rubbed pork loin, salsa verde and broccoli rabe.)

Alejandro Paczka, a 28-year-old designer in New York, has cut back on his Chipotle lunch habit and turned to cheaper options, including Subway sandwiches. Some of the shift is for “money reasons,” but people are also just tired of “eating slop” — a reference to “slop bowls,” a description coined by critics.

There’s a resistance to: “I go to the office, and I eat slop,” Paczka said. “Kind of like cattle.”