The Local newsletter is your free, daily guide to life in Colorado. For locals, by locals. Sign up today!
Front Rangers sure do like smoothie bowls, juices, and chia toasts. Whole Sol Blend Bar, the 100-percent organic and dairy- and gluten-free superfood restaurant, just opened its fourth and fifth locations. The new spots, in RiNo and at Boulder’s 29th Street Mall, join the two-and-a-half-year-old fast-casual brand’s existing locations in Sloan’s Lake, LoDo, and Pearl Street in Boulder.
“There’s been a huge increase in demand for vegetarian and gluten-free foods, with people being more health conscious with their choices,” says Phil Dumontet, who started Whole Sol with wife Alexa Squillaro. “We’ve decided to double down on Colorado. It was really a no-brainer to expand in our own backyard.”
Whole Sol’s menu is chock-full of smoothie bowls, toasts, and snacks sporting ingredients we could all probably stand to eat more of, like dragon fruit, açaí, chia, and kale. It also cold-presses organic juices and froths up almond milk for CBD, turmeric, and matcha lattes.
The RiNo location will serve as the brand’s test kitchen, which means lots of new offerings are coming out of the 36th and Walnut Street spot. Taste-test potential menu items like vegan mac and cheese, chickpea meatballs, and zoodle salads there, mostly as grab-and-go dishes you can take home or back to the office. Whole Sol hopes to roll out these carryout and delivery-friendly dishes at other locations, too, as Dumontet and Squillaro have seen an increased demand for to-go-centric offerings since COVID.
Frequent imbibers of colorful Whole Sol’s Beauty Elixir and Daily Greens juices will appreciate the just-introduced Juice Pass, available at the RiNo and 29th Street outposts. For $12.99 a month or $119 for the year, you can sip on unlimited $5 juices, which are up to 50 percent off normal prices. The pass is good for use at all five Whole Sol outposts.
Also cool about the RiNo space, Denver street artist Pat Milbery, famous for his Love this City paintings around town, created a mural filled with fresh fruit and mountains. “Pat hit it out of the park,” Dumontet says. “The mural says ‘With Sol, from Denver.’ He really brought nice, local flair to the space.”
Find the nearest Whole Sol location to you here.
