Green’s Damon Brasch wants to bring vegan comfort food to the masses

Spurlock would have a lot more options here than at McDonald's. The menu at this place reads like a round-the-world trip in guilty pleasures, from flatbread pizzas to kung pao chicken to a Texas po-boy oozing with luscious espresso barbecue sauce.

While eating this food constantly would likely pack on some pounds and, perhaps, push up your cholesterol levels, you'd still be on one of the strictest food regimens around. At Green, a funky two-year-old bistro tucked in the corner of a north Tempe strip mall, the sundae is soy, and the buffalo wings are mushrooms. The burger is ground oats and barley. The fries are still fries, though, because no animals are harmed in the deep-frying of a potato.

Everything Green serves is vegan — meaning it's not only meatless, but also free of milk, eggs, cheese, gelatin, or any other edible animal product.

Comfort food may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you say the word "vegan," but this eatery aims to change that.

I'd eat there all the time if I lived a little closer — and didn't care about squeezing into my jeans. But, hey, if I'm gonna blow my diet, this place gives me plenty of reasons to splurge.

Green is the brainchild of 34-year-old chef Damon Brasch.

He also owns That's A Wrap, a sandwich and salad shop in Central Phoenix, and he created the menu for the recently launched The Center Bistro, an organic eatery housed inside a yoga center off Mill Avenue in Tempe.

Those two other restaurants are popular in their own right, with smart, appealing offerings — healthful salads and wraps in the case of That's A Wrap, and organic cuisine for The Center Bistro. But Green is a tour de force, one of those so-simple-yet-so-clever-I-wish-I'd-thought-of-it-myself concepts that comes along once in a lifetime, and makes a guy a millionaire. Brasch has made vegan food downright tasty.

Though the nonprofit Vegetarian Resource Group estimates that vegetarians make up only 2.3 percent of the total U.S. population — with vegans accounting for up to half of that — an estimated 30 to 40 percent of the population "seeks vegetarian options at least some of the time." According to a Mintel market research report, the U.S. vegetarian food market is expected to grow to more than $1.7 billion by 2010. And thanks to the influence of the Slow Food Movement, there's a growing demand for organic local produce.

But let's face it. There's a reason our nation is still the world's fattest. McDonald's sales were up almost 10 percent in February, and although the company recently launched a lower-calorie Smart Choice Program, Mickey D's isn't raking in billions by pushing apple slices and grilled chicken salads. It's the Big Mac that keeps them coming back. And someone's still ordering fries with that.

Brasch knows it. So he took his desire to cook good food, promote his own philosophies, and run a successful business — and he came up with Green.

Instead of going the light, health-conscious route with piles of rabbit food (although you can get a salad to go along with your deep-fried tofu and sweet peanut sauce), Green's menu capitalizes on our insatiable lust for fast food.

Apparently, omnivores aren't the only ones who get hungry for pepperoni pizzas, burgers, and deep-fried snacks, and the vegan versions don't seem to be much more healthful.

"A vegan who eats lots of fried foods, even if fried in what people refer to as 'healthy oil,' is still getting a lot of calories and fat," says Sharon Salomon, a registered dietician from Phoenix asked to study Green's menu. "Balance and moderation are key to any kind of diet."

There's actually an upside to frying foods in canola oil, as they do at Green; it's considered the most healthful edible oil, with high levels of unsaturated fats, very little saturated fat, and no cholesterol. (Cholesterol is found only in animal products, says Salomon. However, blood cholesterol levels can also be raised by certain kinds of saturated fat.)

But that doesn't mean you can gorge yourself with no consequence.

Maybe the pleasure centers in our brains are hard-wired for crispy and crunchy and gooey indulgences, no matter what the treats are made of. Last year, the results of a study at Tufts University suggested that it's common for people to crave foods that are high in calories.

Brasch is no dummy. If fried pita chips and chocolate chip cookies get people eating vegan, even on occasion, then so be it. He's more interested in saving animals than calories.

"Americans need to be stroked into it," he says of the vegan diet. "I want to eat healthy, too, but I'm not gonna go out of my way to eat sprouts if it doesn't taste good."

From the faux chicken in my noodle dish to the meaty, shredded mushrooms in my barbecue, there's no animal flesh in anything here. The cheese on the pizza, the soft-serve ice cream — all soy. No egg in the stir-fry. No animal products in anything.

Brasch wrote the business plan for Green 10 years ago but didn't open the restaurant 'til 2006. Nestled in a sleepy strip mall on Scottsdale Road, the place is so inconspicuous that it's easy to miss, even if you've been there before. But it's destination dining in its own quirky way, frequented by a mostly young, arty crowd.

Service is fast-casual — order and pay at the counter, snag one of the funky tables (painted with jagged tree and plant silhouettes), and somebody will bring out your food when it's ready. In the meantime, there's plenty of atmosphere to soak up. A colorful row of old car doors and framed pieces of art fill opposite sides of the room, while tiny white Christmas lights and glowing paper lanterns brighten the green and orange dining room.

The bohemian cafe vibe isn't particularly unusual, but the vegan comfort food is unlike anything else in town.

"Basically, I just wanted to take the taboo out of the word 'vegan,'" Brasch says, "so the average Joe would think of it as just another kind of cuisine."

For now, that's a work in progress. To many, veganism still connotes a strict diet that's more about philosophy than flavor, so even though Green is technically vegan, the restaurant bills itself as "New American Vegetarian."

At first, Brasch considered leaving the word "vegetarian" out of it, too. He's tried to keep the vegan message subtle, staying focused on cooking up craveable dishes, like jerk tofu salad, or drunken mushroom "chicken," with noodles bathed in a heady mix of mushrooms, green onions, rice wine, and dark mushroom soy sauce.

"About 30 percent of the people who come into Green have no interest in vegetarianism — they just want a reasonably priced meal," he says.

Ironically, if anyone's given him any flack, it's other vegetarians who want more healthful versions of Green's food.

"It's not necessarily the healthiest thing around," Brasch admits. "A lot of stuff is fried here. And that whole aspect of it has kind of blown up in our face. Most vegans are health-minded, though some live on fries and smoke cigars."

He's already working on a new menu that will include more light alternatives, as well as some gluten-free offerings.

But don't expect Brasch to stop serving vegan chili fries or chocolate-peanut butter Tsoynamis, his answer to the Dairy Queen Blizzard. Treats like those get meat-eaters in the door.

"When omnivores come in and say it tastes really awesome," he says, "that's the biggest compliment."

Vegan" might not be a household word just yet, but it's getting close.

The term was coined in 1944, when the newly founded Vegan Society created its name from the first three and last two letters of "vegetarian."

Now it's in vogue. Celebrities are clamoring for vegan luxury goods from fashion designer Stella McCartney. Pleather has a whole new cachet.

Cookbook author Isa Chandra Moskowitz is giving vegan food an enticing new image with books like Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin's bestselling vegan diet book, Skinny Bitch, has spawned a bestselling cookbook, too: Skinny Bitch in the Kitch.

And if there's any doubt that veganism is sexy these days, get this: Portland, Oregon, now boasts the world's first vegan strip club.

Chefs are in on the trend, as well. In the National Restaurant Association's 2007 "What's Hot & What's Not" survey of nearly 1,300 American Culinary Federation members, meatless/vegetarian dishes and vegan dishes are ranked "hot" by more than half of the respondents. Vegan and vegetarian options are de rigueur on menus, and exclusively vegetarian fine-dining establishments are cropping up around the country.