Garden Cafe is part hipster, part hippie. It's as if all the people in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle had consensual big-city sex and made a restaurant baby. Inside, Garden Cafe's booths are filled with skinny, black-shirt-and-Jeggings-wearing dudes who come here to work on their short stories and hang out with their scowls. Outside, a guy in a big hat waters the giant garden while long-haired, Crocs-wearing olds eat Brussels sprouts and talk about their new turquoise jewelry collections.
The menu is pricey for your average sandwich/soup cafe food. The cheapest sandwich they have is a chicken salad sandwich and a side (fruit salad, coleslaw or potato salad) for $6.95.
While you're ordering your food, moms at a booth nearby are telling each other their favorite parts of Bridesmaids without mentioning the opening hump scene or the sink dumping.
Along with the usual celery, herbs, lettuce and tomato, you notice the chicken salad has dried apricots in it and is served on a croissant. Croissants are fucking awesome (buttery, bad for you, ear-shaped) and so are dried apricots (sugary, apricotty, ear-shaped), so you're pretty hyped.
As you enjoy your meal out on the shaded, serene, overflowing-with-one-sweating-dude's-musk back patio, you notice that there's a kids kennel at the edge of the garden, filled with Little Tikes playhouses. It's far enough away from the tables that you can't see the children (bonus), but you can hear their screams if one starts bleeding from their eye or diaper (bonus).
The side of fruit salad that came with your chicken salad sandwich is a bowl of grapes, cantaloupe, honeydew and apples that appears to have zero items in it that are fresh from the garden you're staring at. But whatever, it's called Garden Cafe, not We Promise Everything We Make At This Sandwichsterant Comes From The Garden You're Sitting In.
Two mockingbirds in the garden finish off someone's leftovers and agree that Garden Cafe's chicken salad is almost as good as that "holy worm-fucking delicious" chicken salad from Central Market. They then enjoy a simultaneous chair shit.
