Touring Cava’s new 21,000-square-foot headquarters in Northwest D.C.’s City Ridge development feels like walking the line at one of the booming Mediterranean fast-casual concept’s restaurants. Each room is named for an elemental ingredient in building a bowl, including tzatziki, hummus, avocado, coriander, dill, paprika, harissa, chickpea—and Crazy Feta, of course.
Featuring a full kitchen where new ingredients and dishes-in-progress are tested, the buzzy operation consumes a whole floor and is home to roughly 60 employees, a fraction of the more than 8,700 people now working for the publicly traded company valued at more than $6 billion with 328 restaurants spread across 24 states and D.C.
It can be hard to believe that Cava’s first location only opened on Bethesda Row in 2011, the brainchild of its four co-founders: CEO Brett Schulman, now 52, chief concept officer Ted Xenohristos, 45, director of culinary excellence Ike Grigoropoulos, 43, and Dimitri Moshovitis, 44, executive chef for the full-service restaurant group. That group includes two locations of Cava Mezze, Melina, Julii and the forthcoming Bouboulina, a Greek-influenced American steakhouse in North Bethesda’s Pike & Rose.
The meteoric rise of Cava is one of the brightest stories to ever come out of the DMV’s restaurant scene, but its success was never a forgone conclusion. Talking to the four co-founders today, there’s still a sense of disbelief that their path has taken them to where they are.
The story of Cava begins when Ted, Ike and Dimitri were tweens, all growing up in Montgomery County as children of Greek immigrants. Though they went to separate high schools, the boys bonded while playing in a Greek basketball league.
They all loved the cuisine their families made—a shared heritage that helped bind them, even as it separated them from non-Greek classmates. “We didn’t eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, we brought in spanakopita,” Ted says.
Dimitri was particularly entranced by food, spending hours in the kitchen watching his mother cook everything from braised short rib atop bucatini with a snowfall of grated mizithra cheese to lemony chicken-powered avgolemono soup. At the end of his freshman year of high school, he dropped out to pursue a culinary career. “My parents weren’t happy,” he says. “I was a first-generation American. They wanted something prominent—a doctor or lawyer—not a cook.”
Meanwhile, Ted and Ike attended college, though neither graduated. They ended up back in Montgomery County, working as servers at Olazzo, Bethesda’s beloved red sauce spot. It was a formative experience for both; Ike assisted with keeping the books, putting his unfinished accounting studies to use, while Ted worked the front of the house.
As luck would have it, Dimitri bought Tel Aviv Café, a casual Mediterranean joint just around the corner. When Ted and Ike had a break, they’d pop over to grab a coffee so the three friends could talk about their wildest dream: owning a restaurant together.
After Tel Aviv closed, a former vendor told Dimitri about a space that once was home to a Russian bakery in Rockville’s Traville Village Center, a potential site for the friends’ restaurant. The plaza where it was located was littered with empty storefronts, the space needed major renovations and they had no money. Despite the odds, they decided to go for it, maxing out a few credit cards to cover the build-out.
The trio ultimately decided to do mezze-style modern Mediterranean cuisine as a celebration of their roots. Dimitri chose to eschew well-known dishes such as spanakopita, moussaka and pastizzi. “All that stuff is awesome, and I love eating it, but that’s not all Greek cuisine is,” Dimitri says. Instead, he developed a forward-thinking menu featuring grilled whole fish served with the head on, baby lamb chops meant to be eaten by hand, and a skillet of lemon and ouzo-accented saganaki cheese that would be set alight tableside.
The space felt like a wine cave, so they covered the windows to emphasize its dusky, cozy atmosphere. Looking for a short, pronounceable name, they dubbed their fledgling startup Cava Mezze, the former a term for wine cellar or specialty wine store in Greece. It opened the Tuesday before Thanksgiving in 2006 with Ike behind the bar, Ted waiting tables and managing, and Dimitri in charge of the tiny kitchen, backed up by a single cook and a dishwasher.
The first few months were a blur, but two things quickly became clear: The restaurant was hugely popular—often requiring a two-hour wait—but it wasn’t making any money. Taking a break from behind the bar, Ike took a few days to analyze their finances. He realized their food and labor costs were through the roof. The first-time restaurateurs adjusted but were soon faced with a new challenge. Diners often would ask for to-go orders of the restaurant’s dips and spreads: hummus and spicy hummus, tzatziki, Crazy Feta punctuated with jalapeño peppers, and what many simply called “that red stuff” because they weren’t familiar with harissa, the fiery red chile paste that became one of Cava’s signature items.
A customer suggested they package and sell the dips and spreads in local Roots Market; he could help them get stocked. So after closing and cleaning up for the night, the friends would form a primitive production line. Dimitri made batches in the kitchen, then brought tubs of them out to the bar. There, Ted and Ike would scoop the contents into containers, put on lids and plastic rings, and use a blow-dryer to seal them. They would do deliveries early the next day, transporting the dips in the back of Ted’s car. “Tempers would flare,” Ted remembers. “We [were] going on no sleep, wondering what we are doing with our lives.”
The learning curve for the new business was steep. Deliveries were late. A fair number of dips and spreads spoiled. The production process at the restaurant was unsustainable. Once again, they were confronted with the problem of having created something popular that they were unable to monetize properly.
Fortuitously, Ted’s cousin Christina Hall introduced them to Brett Schulman, chief operating officer of Snikiddy Snacks, a successful local natural snack food company that was founded by his wife and mother-in-law. “We hit it off quickly,” Ike says. “Sometimes you meet people and it just feels right.”
Brett came on as a consultant, quickly stabilizing the dips and spreads business. Concurrently, the three friends were talking about opening a second Cava Mezze in D.C. They found a location on Capitol Hill and obtained a loan. But in the middle of building out the space, the Great Recession hit. As the economy cratered, the bank pulled their loan. Ted and Ike had to sell their condos and move back in with their parents.
Out of the blue, the guys caught a lucky break. While catering an event at the Greek Orthodox Church of St. George in Bethesda, Ted bought a couple of raffle tickets. He wound up winning a Jeep Wrangler. He drove it straight to the dealership and sold it for $21,000, money they used to finish the second restaurant, which opened in 2009. It was an immediate hit, scoring rave reviews, its reservation book always packed, and helping the three friends earn the Restaurateurs of the Year award from Washingtonian.
As the restaurants prospered and the dips and spreads business flourished, Ted, Ike and Dimitri felt Brett could play an even bigger role in their expanding empire. In March 2010, they offered to make him their fourth partner in all their ventures. At first, Brett demurred, telling them, “Giving away 25% of your company is not a good deal for you.”
“Right then and there,” Ted says, “I knew that not only was he really smart and had the business acumen, but he was also a good person.”
Brett asked for a night to consider the offer. It seemed like it would be a good fit. “Everyone had complementary skills,” Brett says. “Dimitri with the food, Ike with operations and finance, Ted with concept and brand, and I brought the business side of it.”
But he still wasn’t sure. That evening, he and his wife dined at the new Cava Mezze on Barracks Row. He was impressed with the diversity of the clientele, the happiness of the employees, and the energy of the enterprise. “And I loved how good I felt after I ate,” he says. “I didn’t feel gut-bombed; I felt satisfied.”
He was in.
Brett and his family often ate fast-casual, but he found himself yearning for healthier dining choices in a market littered with burger and pizza options. He had a lightbulb moment: Why not transform Cava Mezze’s Mediterranean cuisine into a fast-casual concept? “This food needs to be unleashed to a larger audience,” he remembers thinking.
To test the idea, the four partners gathered at the Rockville restaurant in June 2010. Dimitri put together a bowl with salad greens, a few dips, chicken souvlaki, tomatoes, onions and a few other things. Everyone loved it and could see the potential, but knew they didn’t have the resources to make it a reality.
They started reaching out to family members, friends, customers—anyone who could be a potential investor. In between lunch and dinner service at the original Cava Mezze, they hosted presentations, running through the concept and the numbers, showing off sketches of the interior from designer Peter Hapstak, and offering a taste of the food. “We pitched it as the Greek Chipotle,” Ted says.
It took three months, but they raised $2.6 million for three initial locations of Cava Mezze Grill. (The name was later shortened to Cava Grill before simply becoming Cava.)
The inaugural location opened on Jan. 18, 2011, on Bethesda Row, the co-founders drawn to the surrounding area’s mix of residential and office space.
It didn’t look like what most Americans expect of a Greek restaurant. There was no blue and white color scheme, the logo instead embracing a black, yellow and white palette. Rather than a sprawling space punctuated with statues of Greek goddesses and amphoras, the slender 1,800-square-foot eatery hewed minimalist industrial with wood tables, black stools, and light fixtures created from grappa bottles.
As they walked the line, diners chose from a base of pita, mini pitas, basmati rice, or romaine lettuce, then had the opportunity to add dips and spreads, proteins—including marinated lamb, Greek sausage flavored with leeks and fennel seed, falafel and grilled chicken—and a flurry of toppings, such as feta, cabbage slaw and tomato-onion salad.
The debut made a splash, garnering positive press as the restaurant began to build a following. But the startup wasn’t making money. Running a fast-casual concept was vastly different than running a full-service restaurant. It felt like the hurdles they faced at the first Cava Mezze and with the dips and spreads business were happening all over again.
Despite the growing pains, they opened a second location in Tysons Corner Center in Virginia a year later in March 2012. It was “disastrous,” as Ted puts it, but for a different reason: People just weren’t coming to dine in their corner of the mall. Hoping to entice folks, the team put flyers on cars in the parking lot, playing a cat and mouse game with security, who would chase them away. A few weeks after opening, they decided to introduce themselves more formally to their new neighbors by giving away free meals while encouraging diners to donate to a nonprofit focused on food insecurity. The first Community Day was a huge hit, creating much-needed buzz and birthing a tradition that continues to this day with the opening of each new location. In the weeks that followed, they had to set up stanchions to control the long lines.
Behind the scenes, though, the outlook remained dour. “It still wasn’t going well businesswise, but we could see that people loved the food,” Ted says.
They pressed on, powered by a belief in their food and the concept.
In July 2012, the third Cava opened in D.C.’s Columbia Heights; the fourth debuted in the District’s Tenleytown that fall. The turning point came with the opening of the fifth Cava in Virginia’s Mosaic District early in 2013. On Community Day, guests waited in line for two hours to receive a free meal. “It opened big, and the other locations started taking off,” Brett says.
That autumn, they did another round of fundraising from family and friends, even as big-name outside investors began inquiring about becoming a part of Cava’s growth. “That was the moment we realized we had something, and we had to do everything we could to not screw it up,” Ike says.
Locations in D.C.’s Chinatown, Bethesda’s Westfield Montgomery mall and Gaithersburg’s Kentlands debuted in 2014. Bigger still, Cava was expanding outside the D.C. area—across the country to California. Ted moved to the Golden State to oversee the building of the commissary kitchen that would service a series of new restaurants (the first opened in Topanga, a suburb of Los Angeles, in October 2015).
As 2015 dawned, all four co-founders could feel Cava was gaining unstoppable momentum. “It felt like the wave was building behind us,” Brett says. “We felt the need to jump on our surfboard and surf it, or we’re gonna get crushed by it.”
They began having more serious discussions with outside investors, raising $16 million in an April deal. Six months later, they raised an additional $40 million to further accelerate Cava’s growth.
The extra capital was necessary due to Cava’s business model. Rather than franchising, they have sole ownership of their locations, a format borrowed from Chipotle. “It came out of our passion for brand control,” Brett says. “We knew it was going to be more capital intensive, but we wanted to put forward a premium brand and a premium product.”
For the next two years, Brett toured the country, looking at potential locations for Cava expansion, including in Richmond, Virginia; Raleigh and Charlotte, North Carolina; Boston; and Dallas and Austin, Texas. During this process, Cava opened in New York City near Union Square in August 2016. More investments poured in. The dips and spreads business was off the charts; they’re now available in Whole Foods and at other grocers across the country.
Cava was becoming a major player.
There were, however, other Mediterranean fast-casual concepts vying for diners’ attention, most notably Zoës Kitchen, though it was struggling financially. The idea was floated that Cava could buy them. Price tag: $300 million. Despite the fact that Zoës Kitchen’s year-to-year sales were down, and they had considerable debt, their portfolio of 258 locations across 20 states was irresistible. Plus, Cava would be sidelining a major competitor.
The deal closed the day before Thanksgiving in 2018. Overnight, Cava went from owning 70
restaurants to owning 328 spread across 23 states and Washington, D.C., making it the largest restaurant operator in the Mediterranean genre.
The Cava team’s joy was short-lived. Zoës was in even worse financial shape than they understood. “I called my wife and said, ‘Oh, my God, what did I just do?’ ” Brett says. “Ten years of great hard work and I just made one critical decision that could undermine this entire business.”
They spent the next year stabilizing Zöes Kitchen and began converting those sites into Cava locations. It was a fraught process. “I used to have black hair pre-Zoës,” Brett jokes. “Now I have gray hair.”
But their hard work was paying off. Everyone was feeling better. It was going to be smoother sailing in 2020.
Then the pandemic struck. However, it turned out Cava was surprisingly well prepared for the dark days ahead.
“After being punched in the face for the first six or seven weeks, and feeling like the sky was falling, we quickly realized a lot of the investments we had made prior to the pandemic were going to pay off,” Brett says, pointing to their ability to quickly pivot by ramping up delivery, curbside pickup and contactless ordering, as well as their numerous locations in suburbs and the Sunbelt, to which many people decamped during the lockdown.
In April 2021, Cava received another $190 million in financing to help the company expand even further. Revenue that year was $500 million, and it rose to $564 million in 2022. It’s safe to say that’s literally tons of Crazy Feta, harissa honey chicken and skhug sold.
In February 2023, Cava announced that the company would be going public late that spring. “Based on feedback and our trajectory, we felt we were ready to be a public company,” Brett says. “Even in our early days, people were asking us if they could buy stock in Cava.”
The night before the initial public offering (IPO), Dimitri and his family walked past the New York Stock Exchange, its facade sporting gigantic yellow and black banners with the Cava logo and the slogan, “Welcome to our table.” His mother began crying, setting off a torrent of tears that swept through the group. “I’m a high school dropout and a second-generation Greek who worked in kitchens his whole life,” Dimitri says. “And now we’re on the stock exchange.”
The next morning, June 15, 2023, the four co-founders gathered at the New York Stock Exchange in lower Manhattan. At 9:30 a.m., surrounded by the other three co-founders, Brett rang the morning bell, signaling the start of trading. CAVA, the company’s official ticker symbol, was on the market.
“I kept asking myself, Is this really happening?” Ike says. “Looking back, I feel like I was floating in la-la land. It was very surreal.”
By the end of the day, the stock had nearly doubled in price, raising $318 million for the company. It was one of the biggest first-day gains in nearly two years, smashing many predictions.
It’s been 13 years since the first Cava opened.Through the ups and downs, the bedrock friendship of the co-founders has endured. “No one has a big head here,” Ted says. “No one’s trying to be the man. Everybody views it as still a partnership. We have always had such an absolute trust in each other, and we have that same trust today.”
The debut location in Bethesda still plays a pivotal role, serving as a testing ground for fresh ideas. Guests can try menu items in development, including baklava-flavored oat milk-tahini shakes, and get a peek at the restaurant’s new, airier Mediterranean-inspired redesign.
Cava continues to add new locations, including its first in Chicago this spring, a foray into the Midwest. According to the company’s IPO filing, the aim is to have more than 1,000 locations in the U.S. by 2032. “It feels like we’ve been working on this thing for our entire lives,” Ike says. “But the crazy thing is, we’re just getting started.”
This story appears in the May/June edition of Bethesda Magazine.