CAVA Welcomes Guests Back to Asheville Restaurant After Hurricane Helene

June 18, 2025 – After closing in September 2024 due to flooding and devastation caused by Hurricane Helene, CAVA’s Asheville restaurant proudly reopens to the community today. The restaurant is located at 14 Swannanoa River Road, Asheville, NC, 28803. Daily operating hours are 10:45 a.m. - 10 p.m.

With Mediterranean-inspired bowls, pitas, dips, and dressings, the fast-casual restaurant chain serves delicious food that helps people eat well and live well. These menu offerings, combined with an emphasis on hospitality and serving others, have created diverse, passionate followers.

“We are so grateful to the CAVA team for their hard work, care, and dedication demonstrated in reopening our Asheville restaurant after Hurricane Helene,” said Louie Lovejoy, Regional Director. “Our mission is to bring heart, health, and humanity to food, and everything we do at CAVA is grounded in that. We couldn’t be more excited to revive our spirit of generosity to our guests, our team members, and the resilient Asheville community this summer.”

Before the doors officially open, every CAVA restaurant invites its new neighbors to the table for a free meal, accepts donations to support a local cause, and matches those donations up to $1,000. Since 2019, this companywide Community Day program has raised more than $600,000 in donations. CAVA’s Asheville Community Day event raised funds for BeLoved Asheville, a nonprofit community-based organization focused on home, health, equity, and opportunity that provides assistance to the underprivileged and underserved people of Asheville, and Buncombe County Long-Term Recovery Group, a coalition of local nonprofits, faith-based organizations, government agencies, and volunteers united to coordinate county-wide disaster recovery through intentional collaboration. CAVA increased its total match for Asheville’s Community Day to $5,000, split between the two partner organizations, to further support ongoing hurricane recovery efforts.

Prior to the grand reopening, CAVA also donated fresh meals prepared throughout the restaurant’s training period to local community members. The company's food donation program launched nationally in fall 2023 to improve food insecurity and reduce food waste as CAVA expands to new locations.

CAVA’s Asheville restaurant will employ 35-40 local people. The company hires people for their hospitality and warmth and is dedicated to creating career pathways for its team members. CAVA offers competitive pay and benefits including paid time off, healthcare, early wage access, an Employee Assistance Program, and free mental health support. CAVA also provides grants to Team Members experiencing unexpected financial needs due to emergency situations through The Goodness Fund.

About CAVA

CAVA is the category-defining Mediterranean fast-casual restaurant brand, bringing together healthful food and bold, satisfying flavors at scale. Our brand and our opportunity transcend the Mediterranean category to compete in the large and growing limited-service restaurant sector as well as the health and wellness food category. CAVA serves guests across gender lines, age groups, and income levels and benefits from generational tailwinds created by consumer demand for healthy living and a demographic shift towards greater ethnic diversity. We meet consumers’ desires to engage with convenient, authentic, purpose-driven brands that view food as a source of self-expression. The broad appeal of our food combined with these favorable industry trends drive our vast opportunity for continued growth.