How the Build-Your-Own Meal Craze Is Reshaping Restaurants

For its part, Chipotle has its own spinoff, ShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen, which features customizable rice, noodle and salad bowls. Ten are open, with more on the way.

Genghis Grill grew its build-your-own stir-fry footprint to 115 restaurants in 2014, a 7.5 percent increase over the previous year. Other build-your-own approaches include My Ceviche where raw fish is mixed in with other items in a bowl, and Crazy Bowl & Wraps with grain-based bowls.

Even sushi is getting the customization treatment, with chains including Fusian in Ohio. Ting Yen, who recently opened his second Sushi Fuku in Pittsburgh, explained that automation—one machine forms a portion of rice into a sheet and another slices a roll into 10 pieces—allows a customized sushi roll to be assembled and plated in about a minute. His lunch business, notoriously slow for sushi restaurants because the rolls can take so long to prepare, accounts for 60 percent of his business.

“Typically people don’t eat sushi for lunch because it takes forever,” Yen said.

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