Out to eat: Green Dog Cafe

We're hearing it more and more: The way Americans produce food impacts the quality of our natural environment in all kinds of ways, from fertilizer use to transportation fuel. As people come to understand this, many are making choices that minimize their personal impact. Some respond by giving up meat, others by choosing organic, others by concentrating on eating from local food sources.

Those people are eating very well indeed. Environmentally-aware choices are often healthy ones, and there is so much creativity these days going into cooking healthy, environmentally conscious food with real respect and ingenuity. We've evolved well past the brown, crunchy health food of decades past.

Evidence: the Green Dog Café, newly opened in Columbia Tusculum. It was created with a green mind-set, including many vegetarian dishes and lot of local sourcing. There is so much to like here that you don't have to care about that: It's good food, created by a good chef, with choices for everyone.

Mary Swortwood was the original owner of the Brown Dog in Blue Ash and Tink's in Clifton, but has been out of those restaurants for many years. This is her comeback. It's in a cheery, bright space in a new shopping center on Columbia Parkway, painted a clear serene turquoise, with touches of wood, laminate tabletops, concrete floor, and some color-splashed art. The arrangement is to order and pay at a counter, and have the food brought to the table.

We split an order one night of delicious chunky guacamole ($9.50) that had obviously just been made - just a few tomatoes and onions mixed in. We ate meat that evening: the chow-chow curry rice bowl ($10): chewy short-grain rice topped with a rich coconut curry sauce and flavorfully-grilled local chicken. On top is a socca, a French pancake/crepe made of garbanzo (gluten-free) flour that I could have eaten many more of.

The Green Dog BLT added real roasted turkey to bacon cooked to a slightly too-hard crunch, fresh tomatoes, arugula and basil mayo on a fat bun. Green Dog fries ($5) are thick-cut potato sticks sprinkled with sea salt that could have been crispier, but we ate every one and enjoyed the unusual curry dip and homemade banana ketchup.

I went back for lunch (it's the same menu) and this time had no meat at all. We started with lightly salted edamame ($4), served beautifully in a roomy glass bowl.

For all you vegetarians who are tired of having only the choice of a thin soy-something veggie burger, I present the Green Dog Burger ($11). A large patty that extends past the bun, it is made of garbanzo beans, mushrooms and herbs. Of course it doesn't taste like a real burger, but it's very good, especially with its tomato jam.

My green bowl ($9.50), brown rice topped with sweet potatoes and spinach, sounds elementary, but preparation by an experienced hand elevated it: the sweet potatoes neatly diced, the spinach perfectly cooked and topped with pine nuts and raisins.

Dessert was a sweet ending: one night berries ($5), another a giant chocolate cookie ($3).

Sweeter, though, was this: Because of the counter-ordering arrangement, there is no tipping at the Green Dog.

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