Urban Plates to open at Westfield Montgomery Mall in Bethesda

Urban Plates is coming to the suburbs at Westfield Montgomery Mall in Bethesda. The restaurant will take over the large space vacated by Naples Ristorante e Pizzeria in the Dining Terrace. Urban Plates' concept is somewhat of a hybrid between fast casual, a really nice cafeteria, and fine dining. This video I found gives a good overview of the ordering process, and shows many of the menu items. Another video from Urban Plates itself gives some more close-up shots.

Diners enter the restaurant and order from overhead menus. Chefs plate your food, which is prepared throughout the day, to your custom preferences. Thus the cafeteria element comes to mind, as the food is in many cases already prepared, and being kept warm at the various stations. Bread will be supplied fresh by a local bakery to be determined, and local craft beers and wine will be available.

The food is upscale, but you order like you would at Chipotle, and carry your meal to a seat you find yourself. Perhaps it is a vision of our dining future in the post-Fight-for-$15/Initiative 77 world - no servers, just chefs.

The menu at Urban Plates features mostly straightforward American cuisine, with an international flavor here and there. There's a chicken vegetable soup and a tomato soup. Eleven salads range from House and Caesar to Thai Shrimp and "Antioxidant." Main plates are dishes your grandfather would recognize, like steak, salmon and turkey meatloaf with BBQ sauce, and include 2 sides and rustic bread. Mac & cheese, mashed potatoes and Brussels Sprouts with turkey bacon are among the side items. The Urban Bowls are the most diverse, drawing on the current poke fad.

A variety of sandwiches will probably be a bigger draw at lunch. Desserts include jumbo size cookies, a number of cakes from which they'll cut you a slice, chocolate pudding, and a Chocolate Peanut Butter Pretzel Crunch Cupcake. Hipsters can be reassured that kombucha is on tap, the chicken is free-range, the beef is grass-fed, and the fish is caught by line and pole. Success here will likely come down to execution of the more straightforward dishes - how tender is the steak, how moist is the cake? Their California restaurants all seem to earn a solid four stars on Yelp, which suggests the quality is consistent across the chain - always a positive sign.

Urban Plates has chosen the D.C. area as its launch point on the East Coast. Its first locations here are scheduled to be in Tysons Galleria (opening July 16) and the Mall in Columbia (opening August 2018). The Westfield Montgomery location will open in 2019, according to Westfield.