CAVA opens Cottleville with dining, digital pickup and delivery

CAVA Group, Inc. opened its first St. Louis-area restaurant in Cottleville on April 17, 2026. The 2,900-square-foot location combines dine-in service with digital order pickup and delivery.

The restaurant is at 4765 B Highway N. CAVA announced daily hours of 10:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. and said the restaurant would employ 25 to 40 people. Its next regional step was a Des Peres restaurant planned for later in 2026. Cottleville announcement

CAVA’s community introduction program offered complimentary meals and a donation match up to $1,000 for the St. Louis Area Foodbank. The company also donated meals made during staff training.

Customers could order preset bowls and pitas or choose their own ingredients. Glazed Salmon was scheduled to join the menu April 20.

No Cottleville sales, delivery share or restaurant profit figures were disclosed.

A recognizable Midwest opening format#

Cottleville follows CAVA’s March 13 entry into Ohio at Oakley Station in Cincinnati. That restaurant opened at 3356 Madison Road in a 3,200-square-foot space with a dining room, digital pickup and delivery. It had the same announced staffing range of 25 to 40 people. Cincinnati opening

The operating hours differ modestly. Cincinnati’s announced closing time was 10:30 p.m., a half-hour later than Cottleville’s. Its announced community event would support La Soupe, a local food rescue organization, with the same maximum donation match.

Cincinnati’s entry followed openings in Chicago, Detroit and Indianapolis. Those locations provide a dated picture of CAVA’s geographic sequence, with new-market introductions occurring alongside expansion in established Midwest cities.

Both entry restaurants retain a dining room alongside pickup and delivery. Their common format offers customers several ways to use the same location.

Digital service is part of the operating model#

CAVA’s fiscal 2025 results give those digital options a useful business context. Digital orders represented 37.9% of CAVA restaurant revenue for the year and 38.9% in the fourth quarter. The revenue base excludes licensed restaurants. The measure includes catering, app and website orders, delivery and digital pickup. Fiscal 2025 results

That category extends well beyond third-party delivery alone. Its revenue share shows why a new dining-room restaurant also needs an organized digital fulfillment process.

CAVA separately defines a Digital Kitchen as a location handling third-party marketplace delivery, native delivery, digital pickup or centralized catering production. Those kitchens lack in-restaurant dining and customer-facing assembly lines. Cottleville’s dining room places it in a different format. Format definitions

Those channels also carry costs. In explaining its fourth-quarter restaurant margin, CAVA cited a higher third-party delivery mix and technology spending associated with kitchen display systems among the pressures. Food costs and wage investments also contributed.

CAVA reported a 21.4% restaurant-level profit margin for that fourth quarter, down one percentage point from a year earlier. Its definition excludes pre-opening costs, depreciation and amortization, so the measure does not capture the full investment needed to add locations.

Cottleville brings the dining-room and digital-service combination used in Cincinnati to a new region. Des Peres remains the next announced step, with no local sales results yet disclosed.