Greens Organic Café & Market

Watermelon, cured and sliced and laid over avocado and fried rice, is the dish that explains Greens Organic Café & Market faster than any label could. It arrives as Teriyaki Sashimi — the watermelon standing in for tuna, finished with spicy aioli and sesame — and it announces the whole premise of the kitchen: plant-based cooking treated as invention rather than apology. Greens is a fully plant-based restaurant on Christina Street North in downtown Sarnia, and nothing on the menu reads as a concession. The vegetables are the main event, and the kitchen wants you to notice what it can do with them.

The current menu runs wide enough to build a full dinner without leaving the premise. The Big Messy Burger stacks a Beyond patty with American cheeze, pickles, white onion, and 1000 Island on a brioche bun — the comfort anchor for a table that wants generous over virtuous. Cauliflower Wings come beer-battered with a choice of sauce and vegan ranch, the easiest thing to pass around a mixed table. House-made potato gnocchi arrives with blistered tomatoes, pesto, nut parm, and sourdough on the side. There are walnut-meat taco rolls, a soy-curl Imam salad, and rice-noodle bowls in Pad Thai, Thai peanut, and Spicy Szechuan builds. The kombucha cocktails are their own section — Raspberry Gimlet, Howling Sangria, Kombucharita — and a weekly drink lineup runs through the calendar, from Tuesday Kombucharitas to Wine Wednesday to Sunday brunch mimosas.