BEYOND HUMMUS | Vol. 1: Sidewalk Café

This review is the first in a series on diners, restaurants and other eateries that cater to vegetarian needs and palates. Follow the series here.

Taylor Dayton
Contributing Writer

If you’ve never heard of the Sidewalk Café on Main and Robinson streets, you’re not alone: it’s not widely known within the VCU community.

Despite this, it’s definitely worth trying out, whether you lead a meat-free lifestyle or not.

If you’re vegetarian and sick of following your meat-eating friends to places that have only the standard veggie burger, grilled cheese or hummus plate menu items, next time suggest Sidewalk Café.

The menu, atmosphere and proximity to campus combine to make Sidewalk Café a nice new option for the student-budget vegetarian diner. It’s reasonably priced and within walking distance from the dorms.

The atmosphere is like your typical bar: dimly lit, somewhat crowded seating, music playing (in this reviewer’s case, an awesome mix of Bon Iver and other similar artists). The only bar aspect Sidelwalk Café was missing was the noise level: You can actually hear the people you’re sitting with.

The menu has a great variety of both animal-friendly and less-animal-friendly items to keep everyone happy. The vegetarian options include a little bit of everything such as the usual soups and salads as well as entrees (around $12) like black bean cakes with rice and salsa, sandwiches (around $9) and sides like the hummus foccacia sandwich and the hot Mediterranean sub.

The roasted garlic potato pancakes; the garden burrito; and the portobello, roasted red pepper, and mozzarella sandwich are delicious. Our starter, however, the potato pancakes, are a dish that leave questions in this reviewer’s mind. The taste was great, but the consistency is a mystery, kind of like pan-fried mashed potatoes that are also mixed with grits and maybe potato puree. They are topped with sour cream and scallions and definitely made with garlic. It’s the kind of food you would eat if it was given to you, but maybe wouldn’t order on your own. Liquid potato aside, the meal was fabulous.

The garden burrito was delicious, but is not recommended if you don’t like spicy foods: The jalapenos are strong. The dish included a salad, nothing too special there, and then a huge plate for the burrito and a side of rice, covered in black beans, which are in turn covered in cheese. The burrito itself was pretty large and filled with a great variety of sautéed vegetables then topped with sour cream and salsa.

The portobello sandwich had the awesome addition of roasted red peppers and was served on an herbed foccacia roll making it more exciting than your classic portobello sandwich that you could easily make at home. What really stood out about it was how not-chewy it was. When ordering anything with portobellos at restaurants, the mushrooms are too often chewy and difficult to eat, which can get awkward when you have food hanging out of your mouth and can’t bite it off.

Sidewalk Café makes a great place for your next weekend outing. This way your friends won’t get tired of your constant suggestions of Ipanema, and you don’t get tired of eating only veggie burgers and iceberg lettuce salads.

The Sidewalk Café
2101 West Main Street, Richmond, VA 23220

BEST FOR

• Groups with different tastes. With a such a variety of foods, the menu can please pretty much anybody, but keep it small: The seating is mostly booths for about four or five.
• First dates. It’s not so quiet any silence would be awkward and not so loud you can’t talk. When you run out of things to talk about, there are TVs and people to watch which always provide fun conversation.

Photos by Mel Kobran