Lemonade Culture

Lemonade captures the L.A. spirit of adventure about food, an appreciation of the freshest seasonal ingredients, and a desire to reinterpret familiar dishes with unexpected twists. Our food is for people who care about what they eat. It’s clean, healthy, and inventive cuisine.

The concept is best described as Seasonal Southern California Comfort Food in a fast-casual cafeteria setting. A comfortable place where locals and visitors enjoy a rotating daily spread of deliciousness: from ruggedly roasted Brussels sprouts to grain salads from around the world to stewed short ribs falling off the bone. Our dishes stress simple preparations with global taste, and are a perfect fit for today’s on-the-go lifestyle and perceptive palate.

Lemonade caters to people looking for a quick lunch or a healthy “grab and go” dinner for the family. The cafés have an emphasis on convenience and affordability, while serving the same fresh, high-quality, and innovative modern cuisine that the brand has become known for.

The food at Lemonade is as creative and diverse as the city’s inhabitants. Our marketplace salads, unique sandwiches, and slow-simmered stews taste as though every culture stirred a bit into the pot. For example, the skirt steak with grilled onions and piquillo peppers with its smoky depth, ping-pongs perfectly with our snappy salad of Chinese long beans, pluot plums, and scallion vinaigrette. 

International influences of the city’s sprawling metropolis provide an array of cuisines, techniques, and ingredients. It really is a choose-your-own-adventure for lunch or dinner. At all of the locations, there are at least 20 different prepared salads, plus eight pot roasts — everything from lemongrass chicken to barbecued brisket — soups, and of course lemonade, six different flavors daily. And don't forget the cookies, cupcakes and brownies; it's almost impossible to do so.

This is how Lemonade works: Guests grab a tray and choose from a buffet of prepared hot and cold dishes displayed behind the counter. They select a portion size of 1, 2, or 3 and choose the dishes they want to eat. Each portion can also be split into halves to sample even more variety, so if they order a 3 portion meal they can actually have six different items!

Marketplace salads are the backbone of our recipes, often featuring ingredients that brighten with flavor as the dish stands, such as kohlrabi with granny smith apple and sesame oil and harissa chicken with bulgur wheat and parsley vinaigrette. Alongside or separately, savor slow-simmered red miso short ribs or Basque chicken with artichokes, where leftovers evolve into handheld robust red miso short rib panini and Basque chicken sandwich with manchego. 

It wouldn’t be L.A. without the sugar on top. Eating healthy sprinkled with a bit of sweet indulgence is very SoCal! Decadent desserts include tiny red-velvet cupcakes, giant oatmeal raisin cookies, and refreshing lemonade spiked with jalapeño and lime. 

The recipes aim to create something new and original rather than simply update versions of more traditional ideas. The results are sophisticated, stylish and modern without being pretentious or faddish.