Collegetown's new Green Cafe: Fresh and Fast

This week the 14850 Dining Report is in Collegetown exploring the new Green Cafe. This massively renovated former bank building hosts a cross between a modern college dining hall and an upscale urban cafe with several food counters around a hot and cold buffet. Green Cafe's cluster of food stations offer freshly prepared sushi, a variety of soups, homemade tofu, sandwiches and wraps, and a juice bar, but most people will gravitate toward the buffet.

Like a salad bar on steroids, Green Cafe's buffet includes some Chinese buffet staples like lo mein and a huge variety of meat, seafood, and vegetable dishes, both hot and cold. There are crisp and fresh hot vegetables, salad fixings, Caprese salad with sliced tomato and mozzarella, tuna salad, meaty ribs, and deliciously creamy macaroni and cheese. The variety here will impress carnivores and vegetarians alike, and it'll be possible to eat very healthy food -- or serious comfort food.

Be careful if you're used to piling the plate high at an all-you-can-eat buffet, though, since at $6.50 a pound, a full plate, or plastic take-out container, can get expensive, fast. Especially when you're piling up the same fried rice and sesame chicken you get at a Chinese buffet, the weight and cost of what you're buying can sneak up on you. If my half-full small take-out container held $5 worth of food, a full large container could come with serious sticker shock. Don't hesitate to ask someone at a register to weigh your container with just a little of your planned purchase in it, so you can get a feel for how much you're spending before you fill up. (We'd love to see a scale by the buffet for customers to use for this purpose.)

We were pleasantly surprised with the quality of the sushi, available in assortments of rolls and bowls, nigiri and maki, and featuring some great tuna, California rolls, and grilled eel, among other items. Here at least the prices are clear from the start, with small sushi combo packages running $8-10.

Green Cafe is a great alternative to Collegetown's sit-down options or the usual array of fried food nearby, but while it's quick and fresh, it's not inexpensive. A lunch of a sushi combo and a small container from the buffet, filled halfway, ran $15.

We look forward to trying the deli sandwiches and the juice bar, and we hope Collegetown can sustain this kind of business. The cafe may eventually decide that staying open 24 hours a day isn't worthwhile, but for now, it's nice to know there are options other than greasy pizza, burger and fries, or diner fare in the middle of the night, whether you're heading home from the bar or finishing a late shift at work.

Find the Green Cafe right on the corner of Dryden Road and College Ave in the heart of Collegetown, call 607-273-3100 or order from Campusfood.com, and tell them you heard about them here.