LODO: New Whole Foods will feature a mac and cheese bar
The new Whole Foods Market at Union Station will have more than alfalfa sprouts and tahini. The first downtown WF will also house three restaurants, a 100-pound tower of cheese and — are you sitting down? — a mac and cheese bar.
(There also will be a poke bar, but can we please just gloss over that? I’m so sick of writing about poke and there are approximately 180 new poke restaurants where you can get your fill.)
But back to that mac and cheese bar. It’s the first of its kind for Whole Foods, a 4-foot-wide Promised Land of carbs and cheese. Varieties will include pulled pork BBQ mac and cheese, roasted tomato mac and cheese and vegan mac and cheese. There’ll be a good old-fashioned basic mac, too.
The local restaurants and cafes setting up shop inside the market are part of its “Friends of Whole Foods Market” campaign. Birdcall, with its fried chicken sandwiches, milkshakes, breakfast biscuits, beer and wine, will open inside, as will Allegro Coffee Roasters and Tel Aviv Street Food by the U Baron Group (Izzio Bakery, Etai’s Bakery Café). Tel Aviv will be serving up falafel, shawarma pitas and, as the name implies, all sorts of Israeli-inspired street food.
That 100-pound tower of cheese will be hand-cut to order by American Cheese Society’s Certified Cheese Professionals. (They are not messing around, you guys. They’ve called in the big cheese guns.)
All the cheese, fried chicken sandwiches, pitas and mac and cheese will be available starting Nov. 15 when the Union Station Whole Foods opens its doors.
Whole Foods Market: 1701 Wewatta St., Denver; wholefoodsmarket.com; opening Nov. 15.