CAVA — Restaurant in Nashville-Davidson

'If this is the future, shoot me now'. My wife and I stopped by Cava in Belle Meade as we were in the area and had time to kill and tummies to fill. The pictures show smiling faces and pleasant looking bowls of food. Wow, what an anticlimax we had to come. Cava described itself as a digital kitchen. What we entered was an empty, sterile and employeeless room with a screen prompting us to download an app to order. There is no alternative way to order. The place had no decoration or music playing. It felt like it had been out of business for weeks, but alas we ordered and food was placed on a shelf by a person from the back. I ordered the crispy falafel pita and my wife the lemon chicken bowl. When I opened my wrap my first comment was 'i think I'm going to need a spoon'. The thing was drowning in sauce. The 'crispy' falafels had as much crisp as soggy bread. The sauces on both mine and my wife's food was so acidic it hurt for hours afterwards. I can tell the ingredients were not bad but the final product was an insult to Mediterranean food. To make it worse there is no one to complain to. If you get bad food or they mess up your order you are stuck with it. At $12 and up for sloppy food and few employees to pay this food is also over priced. Overall, just very poor. If Cava has any passion for food and it's customers it will hire some employees, create some atmosphere and cut down on the lemon by 90%. Right now it feels like it just exists to make money for an owner...

The restaurant that aspires to the warmth of a prison cafeteria! The new design and logistics of this place can best be described by “how can we eliminate as many people as possible from the equation and deal only in transactions that maximize our profit and do nothing for the diner?” While the food is fresh, and I like they’re menu, obviously they took the option of paying fair wages to the typical restaurant worker and said to themselves, “absolutely not”. My lunch was $18. The environment is basically transient. No one is welcome for longer than necessary. Delivery drivers pick up their bags quickly and go. Seating is the minimal accepted standard. Literal hard stools nailed to the concrete floor. I was the only one eating in because there’s no way anyone feels welcome. There’s no one to welcome you! There’s no way for someone to even take your order, there’s no register. Your job as the diner is to come in, use their app, order on your own device, wait quietly, and then notice when someone wordlessly sets your bag on the pickup shelf. You check your own receipt and bags, and then probably go somewhere nicer to eat it, like a gas station bathroom. This concept should be ignored, resisted, and a clear signal sent to owners that it’s not a place for real people to eat at and enjoy. If this is the future than I’ll not be a part of their twisted sense of what it means to serve the community a meal and hire...

You must download their phone application before you can order your food. We dealt with that unneeded process and was sent an email when our food would be ready in 15 minutes. You can see into the kitchen where you have to wait for your food to be placed. We sat there 10 minutes watching the 3 cooks just stand there talking to each other as if there was no food orders to prepare. After 10 minutes, they started to work. Being the only ones there and being told our food would be out in 15 minutes, we assumed they were working on our order. That was a bad assumption. Over the next 35 minutes, they completed 5-6 other others and place them in the window. Finally, 25-30 minutes after we were told our food would be ready, it was put out. If you are looking for a place where your food will be late, you have to place your own order through a custom phone application, and there is no one there to provide any customer support then this...