Eat Your Flowers: Try These Lavender-Inspired Dishes from First Watch Cafe

Move over fruits — because flowers are having a moment!

Floral-inspired drinks and dishes are popping up seemingly everywhere this season — from Starbucks bringing back its wildly popular lavender drinks to Meghan Markle featuring edible flowers in her new Netflix series With Love, Meghan.

PEOPLE spoke with Chef Shane Schaibly, senior vice president of culinary strategy at First Watch Cafe, to learn more about this visually appealing flavor trend, as well as why it’s become such a staple in the restaurant’s many national locations.

“Lavender is super trendy right now, and it’s perfect for spring,” Schaibly tells PEOPLE. “But this actually isn’t our first time serving it. We first used lavender in our Purple Haze juice — a lavender lemonade — as a seasonal menu item in 2021, and its immediate success confirmed its potential.”

And what could be better than a lavender-inspired lemonade? A spiked version.

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“We made Purple Haze a full-time menu item in 2022, and shortly after, we knew we had to spike it, which is when our Spiked Lavender Lemonade was born,” Schaibly continues. 

Lavender-inspired menu items don’t stop at beverages. Schaibly says that First Watch Cafe also serves an immensely popular — and Instagrammable — French toast paired with a “vibrant lavender whip.” He explains that the secret to the dish’s intense color is blue-hued butterfly pea flower tea, which he notes is also a “rising star” in the craft cocktail scene.

“We wanted a dish that was visually stunning but also delicious, so we paired it with fresh berries and our signature berry compote,” he adds.

Schaibly — who notes that First Watch rotates its menu five times per year in order to highlight the freshest ingredients of the season — says that the chain typically tests out more than a dozen dishes a day when in the menu development phase. However, he says, “we knew we had something special for our customers” as soon as the Wild Berry Lavender French Toast hit the table.

“Everyone grabbed their phones to take a picture,” he recalls.

Keen to try one or all of First Watch’s seasonal lavender offerings? The Purple Haze, the Spiked Lavender Lemonade and the Wild Berry Lavender French Toast will be on the restaurant’s menu through May 26. 

You can locate a First Watch Cafe near you here.