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The menu at Organic Krush features rotating seasonal dishes such as a winter stir-fry.
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Spicy Korean BBQ bowl
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University of Richmond alumna and co-founder of Organic Krush Michelle Walrath
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Organic Krush offers a variety of cold-pressed juices and wellness shots.
“We were definitely weird kids,” 45-year-old Michelle Walrath says with a laugh.
Growing up, the co-founder of the eatery Organic Krush relied on herbal remedies — such as slicing lemons and tying them to the bottoms of their feet to reduce a fever — the family kitchen filled with fresh produce and the backyard home to a bountiful garden.
“I had family super focused on health, physical and mental well-being, a lot of holistic medicine, and food was central to the table, to the family and to the day,” the Long Island, New York, native says. “I grew up in an environment where all those things were tied in.”
Walrath says those early childhood experiences instilled something in her.
“It became the norm to be connected to your food and how it made you feel — it was an easy adoption for me as I got older and I embraced all of it," she says.
That connection would eventually lead to sharing her passion for health and wellness with others. Earlier this month, Walrath, a University of Richmond alumna, along with co-owner Fran Paniccia, debuted a new Organic Krush location on the University of Richmond campus, hoping to ignite that same connection with nutritious food among the younger generations.
The college years are “such a meaningful time of life to connect with healthy food,” Walrath says. “If you have a nut or dairy allergy, or are gluten-free, to be able to eat in such an easy capacity on the campus and explore nutrition at an earlier stage of life is huge.”
The vision for a restaurant like Organic Krush began over two decades ago. Majoring in health and women’s studies while in college, Walrath says she drew up her first business plan at 22.
But it wasn’t until she spent a summer traveling with fellow co-founder Paniccia and their children and bonding over the lack of healthy food options on the road that the plan came to fruition.
After discovering an abandoned restaurant space in New York and connecting with a chef friend to devise a menu, the duo debuted their first Organic Krush location in 2015. Since then, they have rolled out six shops between New York and Connecticut, with two more currently in the works. When searching for another area to introduce the chain, Walrath felt called to return to her college roots in Richmond. In 2019, Organic Krush debuted its Short Pump location, the first in Virginia. As the owners sought to expand, UR felt like a natural choice.
“It’s part of that alma mater connection — we wanted to have a presence in the community and make it all tie together,” Walrath says.
The menu at Organic Krush features popular dishes such as Austin Chicken and Spicy Korean BBQ bowls, salads, wraps and tacos; a bakery section dedicated to items from gluten-free chocolate-zucchini muffins to paleo-friendly apple-cinnamon munchkins; acai bowls; a variety of smoothies; pints of bone broth, which Walrath says are a big seller; and cold-pressed juices and wellness shots.
“Our commitment for putting our concept together was that it could be an [entirely] organic restaurant. … Sticking to that has been really satisfying because the community around us has responded so well to it,” says Walrath, who notes she’s excited for students to have access to healthy options.
Located inside the Well-Being Center on campus, the cafe is also home to a test kitchen. Walrath is a donor to the center and says that in the future, UR students will be able to use the space and learn how to make meals from scratch and other basic cooking techniques.
“I think the [test kitchen] concept will always be evolving, but … it will be workshop-driven, and the idea is it’s a very visual and interactive experience,” she says.
As for the full-circle journey and returning to the university where the seeds of the dream were planted, Walrath says, “I saw the opportunity for a different lifestyle. … The dots have [always] been connected; I just didn’t know it then.”
