World Wrapps, located in the Corte Madera Town Center, reopened its doors with an innovative new menu and atmosphere on Tuesday, Nov. 22 after six months of construction.
Owners and Marin residents Matthew Blair and Keith Cox started World Wrapps in 1995 as the first restaurant specializing in wraps and quickly grew the franchise to 25 stores nationally before selling it.
“We invented the Spinach and Tomato tortillas. There were no such thing as those before we started World Wrapps back then,” Blair said. “We wanted to do some new and creative innovations to the menu like those.”
Now, 21 years later, they bought back two World Wrapps restaurants with hopes of once again revolutionizing the fast-casual restaurant world.
“We have two new World Wrapps restaurants that we bought back and we want to grow to the point where we can eventually buy more again,” Blair said.
The construction has completely changed the design of the restaurant, giving it more seating inside and a heat lamp outside.
“We have seating inside now too and we revamped the patio. The redesign made it more of a sit-down restaurant with a more relaxing atmosphere,” Blair said. “The new design of the restaurant is what we will base our next one in Santa Clara on and from there we’ll just see what happens.”
Construction took a total of six months, which was three months more than the original estimate due to plumbing issues and storefront problems.
Andy Morrison, who was hired a year ago when the restaurant was being revamped for marketing and management, believes that the most substantial changes were not the design, but the menu.
“The remodel looks great and has been really well done from a design point. The biggest changes, however, are on the menu because the food has become much more sophisticated and high quality, but remained in a fast-casual setting,” Morrison said.
The menu has been completely recrafted with the addition of many new interesting flavors.
“We spent a lot of time on the menu, looking through it and tweaking the combinations making sure we could put it out consistently delicious,” Morrison said. “The best thing about our first week of operations I would say is that the food is coming out excellent.”
World Wrapps is a unique establishment because the combinations of flavors can not be found in any other fast-casual restaurant, according to Morrison.
“The food combinations seem like they would be from a higher end restaurant, but you get it here in a fast-casual environment,” Morrison said.
The new menu design tried to focus on healthy yet delicious items to make the overall World Wrapps experience better.
“We began making our own dough every day and fresh pressing it to make our signature housemade wraps. We also now have Nori rolls, which is seaweed that surrounds a sushi roll. Not everything is rice or tortilla anymore you can get a multitude of lighter dishes,” Blair said.
The drinks have also changed substantially, including the addition of more global beverages like Boba drinks, Dragon Fruit tea and Vietnamese coffee.
“This is World Wrapps so you can still get food from a lot of global places,” Blair said. “The restaurant still has a very Asian theme, but we also incorporated some South American foods and Hawaiian foods too.”
