August 19-25, 2004

food

Pick Your Battles

SUPER CHUNKS: Watermelon, and a daily selection of fresh fruit, gives a cool edge to the Greenhouse gourmet lunch buffet. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Can one self-serve lunch buffet ever rise to gourmet status? Should it bother?

by Juliet Fletcher

Would we lament if lunch were to become a lost meal? The one that got away from us daily? Already, "picking up lunch" has become the gastric equivalent of crunching data. It's a tedious exercise that must stand in the way of more interesting post-meridian activities. Like leaving work.

(To those who don't have any idea why everyone else doesn't do what you do, marching your slingbacks down to the nearest cafe to enjoy its leisurely service, just sit this one out.)

Sensing a form of lunch apostasy among lunch-packers and picker-uppers tired of sandwich crumbs falling like scree from their cubicle desks, food-market owners are beginning to recast the lunch buffet. They bother because it's the way a majority of people eat, every day. And they're attempting to make the buffet delicious and fun, because they're in the business of selling, and so undoubtedly relish the challenge.

The site for such an experiment is inside the sage-green and chrome sidings, renovated last year, at Chestnut and Juniper. Greenhouse is a food market with gourmet aspirations. It's there on its awning wording, and in the purple and gilded ceiling, stretching above the back room beyond the counter crush, and in a close inspection of the trays of hot and cold offerings, which divide themselves roughly by regional cuisines — Mediterranean, Chinese, Middle Eastern, Japanese, Italian and various shades of any or all of these.

On our recent noon visit, Carolyn Wyman, assistant copy editor, made a beeline for the cooked dishes, like vegetable lasagna and salt shrimp, diving through the "big lines at lunchtime, which make you think the food is really great but I suspect it's more location, location, location." Tami Fertig, diligent editorial intern, meanwhile built a salad of cold items that still pushed basic buffet boundaries. But while we, like the rest of the room, wanted to eat quickly and get back to work — how else would we ever hope to afford those slingbacks and future cafe lunches otherwise? — Tami found the crush of nearly a hundred shoppers a little daunting: If she'd taken time to mull over her choices, she reckons she "probably would have been mown down."

Picking up a dish of Greenhouse's tabbouleh, though, you can see the difference from usual buffet fare. Theirs, they say, is made with a mix of "natural grains," not just bulghur wheat, which takes it away from the traditional dish but gives it way more texture. It also contained raisins, red onion, olives and carrot, and was seasoned powerfully with soy sauce. An ambitious concoction, perhaps, but not altogether harmonious: Tami thought that the raisins and Mediterranean influence of olives "clashed," and that it was generally too salty. However, the couscous had more to recommend it, traditionally vinegary and piquant.

Carolyn had some advice for the first-timers at Greenhouse's hot plates: "The salmon teriyaki fillets were moist and truly delicious. Since everything on the buffet costs $4.99 a pound, I recommend loading up on it and only it." The other cooked dishes, she felt, aimed too high — such as the veggie lasagna ("soggy") and other pasta dishes, which were all roiling in white sauce. But equally, she was caught out with high expectations: She heaped spoonfuls of the seafood delight onto her plate, spotting slices of rosy lobster alongside shrimp, mussels and snow peas, before discovering, too late, that they were in fact carrot. She was less than delighted — in her words, a "sucka!"

Among Tami's picks were "very large red and green grapes" — with "larger size but not larger flavor"; rice balls, with carrot, shinko leaves and seaweed, which were "simple, subtle, almost delicious"; and tofu triangles, layered with scallions, red peppers and seaweed. This last was picked up "because its sandwichlike structure intrigued me, but after a few bites I was bored," Tami admits, pointing to the "supple, slippery kind of tofu that jiggles" as the disappointment.

A couple of highlights stood out: Simple combinations of fresh vegetables — mushrooms, red and green peppers, and the ever-present carrot and red onion, which Tami found thankfully "not loaded down with saucy stuff." And the BBQ young chicken emerged from an otherwise uninspiring assortment of lo meins and fried rice: A deftly seasoned leg provided a hit of juicy meat that flaked delicately from the bone.

Once the idea of gourmet buffets takes off (as it certainly has here, whether or not the results are distinguished enough right now to deserve the name), perhaps it will open the floodgates to more daring interpretations of the g-word. Because for now, all we could think, as we got up from the neat, functional table area to clear our trays, was that, as in the best kitchens in the city, quality rests with how the food fares, more than the evident ambition or presentation. But for those not prepared to give up on lunch just yet, Greenhouse — with its pavement tables, and the complimentary slices of French baguette (which, in all the crush, we failed to notice until our way out) — might be a reasonable compromise of style and speed.

Greenhouse 1324 Chestnut St., 215-545-2306 Lunch, Mon.-Sat., 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Lunch buffet, $4.99 per pound Wheelchair accessible Smoking not permitted Credit cards accepted