Another week, another Fulton Market restaurant hits the scene: This time, it’s Honeygrow (179 N. Morgan St.), a Philly-based company known for its customizable stir-fries, salads, cold-pressed juices, and honeybar (more on that later). It debuts Friday, and is the nineteenth location (the first in the Midwest) for the counter-service chain, which has been around since 2012.
Culinary director David Katz applies a fine-dining background (he previously owned the Philadelphia restaurant Mémé) to the menu, using fresh produce (the restaurants don’t even own freezers) and ingredients sourced locally whenever possible.
“I really liked what Honeygrow and Justin [Rosenberg, the company’s founder and CEO] were doing,” Katz says of why he came aboard in 2015. “Everything fresh. Making all the sauces and all the dressings. It’s like fine dining minus the server,” he adds.
Katz has taken it upon himself to gift each Honeygrow city with its own special stir-fry flavor. For Chicago, this proved challenging: “Chicago is an interesting one. Italian beef, hot dogs, deep-dish pizza: You can’t really do a stir-fry out of those. So we decided to move away from food and on to Chicago icons: Cubs, Ditka, Jordan. My assistant brought up Capone, and we finally settled on a ‘spaghetti’ dish.”
Prepare to meet the Capone: egg white noodles with a tomato-basil sauce incorporating Butcher & Larder’s Italian sausage, roasted red peppers, organic baby spinach, red onions, grape tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and Parmesan. Salads, like stir-fries, can be ordered in pre-set flavor combos or customized via a proprietary touchscreen kiosk ordering system.
Honeygrow’s pièce de résistance, however, is arguably the “honeybar”—a create-your-own bowl of fresh fruits and toppings such as plain yogurt, dark chocolate chips, granola, coconut shavings, house-made whipped cream, and the restaurant’s namesake. “You create the bowl and we drizzle local clover, wildflower, or buckwheat honey over it at the end,” Katz explains.