RESTAURANT REVIEW : Green Street: A Way of Life to Shoppers

Seven years ago, Green Street Restaurant moved to Shoppers Lane--and was that ever a symbolic step. Green Street is essentially Pasadena’s No. 1 shoppers’ restaurant. It serves light, lunchy food exclusively: sandwiches, omelets and quesadillas with a raft of different fillings, build-your-own stuffed potato skins and, of course, salads. Twenty percent of Green Street’s business is chicken salad.

But this light, airy place with the easygoing abstract paintings on the walls is about more than shopping, or even eating. It’s evidently a way of life. No fewer than 18 menu items bear people’s names; a certain Lisa has two sandwiches named after her, one of them being Lisa’s Other Sandwich. The waiters, male and female, all tend to have ponytails. Sit here a while and you start to feel like an extra on “thirtysomething.”

But hey, let’s not just sit. Let’s order something.

The first thing you notice is that for all the light and lunchy nature of this food, the portions are unexpectedly large. The smallest salad, the Dianne (of which about 250 are sold here every day), domes up high on a plate; it’s a full pound of lettuce with a quarter-pound of chicken, plus a little bit of fried rice noodles and toasted almonds in a sweet dressing. It’s not the most exciting chicken salad in the world, unless you easily get worked up over mass quantities of iceberg lettuce, but it is definitely one of the larger ones.

On the first page of the menu, where we learn that Green Street is donating money to San Francisco earthquake victims, it is explained that the menu is featuring rice at this season because, one gathers, many people around the world eat rice. Ordinarily this would be a setup for vegetarianism, but Green Street has no qualms about serving meat. The chili, which is of the tomatoes-and-ground beef persuasion, is very mild but indisputably full of meat.

Not that Green Street always avoids strong flavors, either. With any sandwich comes a basket of half a dozen different mustards. Currently Green Street is keen on the Jamaican “jerk” flavoring; it serves jerk chicken in various guises, and even jerk rice and vegetables in this season to celebrate rice. Green Street’s jerk sauce is a loud one full of clove, allspice, hot pepper and lime, rather like the bottled sauce called Uncle Bum’s.

The burgers are made with meat that does taste freshly ground, and needless to say there are a lot of different models. A Sausalito burger, for instance, is served on fried sourdough bread with mild chiles and a choice of cheeses melted onto the bread. There are about half a dozen steak sandwiches, mostly involving fried onions and cheese and made with rather ordinary steak, I’m afraid.

And of course a lot of things are very much shoppers’ stuff, like Stephen’s sandwich (chicken breast, mushrooms, cheese and sour cream) and Big John’s meat loaf sandwich (thin slices of dense beef meat loaf, green with parsley, and your choice of cheese).

The desserts are shamelessly rich. The brownie is a classic as it is, but you can get it buried under masses of ice cream and whipped cream. With its flimsy gesture of a crust, the boysenberry cobbler is really a sort of hot berry pudding. The Key-lime cheesecake does have a Key-lime flavor, and the kitchen deserves points for not indulging in green food coloring.

On the whole, this may not sound very exciting, but that might be the point. Green Street is about more than food. It’s essentially a mellow, tidy, pampering sort of place; a way of life. And a way of shopping, of course.

Green Street Restaurant, 146 S. Shoppers Lane, Pasadena; (818) 577-7170. Open for breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days. Beer and wine. Street parking. All major credit cards accepted. Lunch for two, food only, $21 - $43.