Let me get one thing straight: I myself am not a vegetarian. Cheeseburgers are an integral part of my religious views, and in fact I’m quite interested in venturing into the world of offal. BUT…
I really like vegetarian restaurants. They denote something deliberate as opposed to a few throwaway dishes, created to appease that customer demographic; I usually find that a chef who starts the brainstorming-buying-cooking process knowing he is to do so without meat comes up with some pretty fantastic things. This results in a strange phenomenon: the unwitting vegetarian. I have often eaten food that was so tremendously good, I hadn’t the chance to realize it was lacking in meat.
Such was the case at Garden Grille here in Providence. A no-frills destination that looks out on an expanse of black concrete, it’s not the most visually stunning place from the outside. The interior, though, is bright and clean, if impersonal, with booths by the window and punchy orange walls that trigger a synesthetic craving. A perusal of their enormous menu was enough proof that they weren’t doing this vegetarian thing half-assed. Cutting the meat out of an equation by no means has to be a death sentence; a steady presence of crisp produce, fortified by a tasty but narrow scope of cheeses, serves it well, so that each dish feels substantial and savory enough to stand on its own.
A salad with grilled pears, asparagus, walnuts, and blue cheese was surprisingly light. The pear was firm but caramelized under the heat, making each bite a parcel of different textures and flavors, a resonant succession of salty-sweet.
This seaweed salad missed the mark for me – it tasted too much like the ocean – but I did love to look at it.
The pizza selection was abundant, and the pizzas themselves pretty good. In place of a typical dough crust was grilled flatbread, a substitution about which I felt ambivalent: it made the dish lighter, plus the grilling imparted a nice smoky depth to what might’ve been a sweet and fluffy crust, but it still just felt like something was missing. Here, a pizza of portobello mushrooms, red peppers, grilled onions, and goat cheese. The onions could’ve browned a little more, but everything else was a classic combination that went together infallibly and harmoniously. One thing I really liked was that there wasn’t a lot of sauce, which put a lot of focus on the toppings themselves.
I want this pizza for dessert. All the time. Grilled flatbread again, moistened with olive oil, topped with mozzarella, caramelized red onions, goat cheese, and Turkish figs, and finally drizzled with balsamic reduction. These onions were thinner and more cooked down than the rings of onion on the portobello pizza, lending a subtle, slippery crunch. The figs, delightfully chewy, committed me to eat figs a lot more often. I found myself happier here at the flatbread crust; a dough would’ve been too soft and sweet in the presence of these very rich toppings, particularly the bites with just bread and balsamic.
You might want to try somewhere else if you’re looking for ingenuous flavor experimentation, since Garden Grille sticks pretty favorably to familiar combinations. But what we have here is a solid lunch spot: affordable, agreeable, and perfectly pleasant to vegetarians and meat-eaters alike.
*: Herbivoracity?
