The Fat Radish Restaurateur Launches Fast Food Company With Meals in Jars

The restaurateur behind fashiony LES restaurant The Fat Radish is getting in on the fast food game in the most fashiony way possible — veggie-heavy meals in jars. Phil Winser has teamed up with former Burger King executive Felipe Hallot to create a new company called TYME, which packages health-focused meals in single serving, screw-top plastic jars.

The jars don’t look quite like the mason jar meals popular on Pinterest, but it’s hard not to make the visual comparison. The meals, created by former Fat Radish chef Nicholas Wilber, are layered in the jars by ingredient and end up looking like the colorful dioramas of a meal that make the style so beloved by the social media set. An option called “The Original” has black rice at the bottom, green tahini on top, and then beets, chickpeas, carrots, cucumber, and radish.

Each of the six options costs $10, and starting this week, they’re available for delivery in New York through the TYME website. They will also be sold at a pop-up at the Frieze Art Fair this weekend, and more locations are planned in New York City for later this year.

Winser and Hallot see TYME as a grab-and-go way to eat healthy food. Each jar is recyclable and has bases like grains or noodles. Many of them are also vegan, denoted by a “v” on the menu, although Hallot notes in statement that they wanted to “cut out the confusing buzzwords” and don’t define as a vegan company. People who return their jars can receive $1 off their next meal.

Here’s the full menu that will be served at Frieze, with photos:

TYME is not the first New York restaurant that’s serving single-serving meals in a jar. Restaurateur and chef Chloe Vichot opened her Greenwich Village restaurant Ancolie with salads and lasagnas in glass jars that she designed herself after a Kickstarter campaign.

It’s also increasingly common for hip chefs and restaurateurs to enter the more casual (and with scale, more lucrative) fast food business, from Danny Meyer with Shake Shack to Will Guidara and Daniel Humm with Made Nice.

But so far, Winser and Hallot’s food company sounds slightly different. They’re not launching with a physical space, nor is the create-your-own format at play. It’s more part delivery-only service, part Pret a Manger-style prepackaged goods deli or restaurant. Full details are still on slim what their physical expansion plan looks like, but stay tuned for more. From the sounds of it, they will want to be ubiquitous.