The Chic Guide: What is The Greene Canteen?
Brittany Baum, Owner of The Greene Canteen: We’re a casual eatery with a small retail shop. Our focus is sustainable, unique and earth-friendly items and foods. We highlight how healthy can be tasty, and we showcase that food is medicine through our recipes and our interactions with customers. We’re just getting started and we can’t wait to see how we evolve over time.
The Chic Guide: What’s the inspiration behind The Green Canteen?
Baum: The need for quick, plant-based foods with a focus on health in Yellow Springs. My husband and I primarily eat this way and wanted to offer this type of food to our community as well. We also cater to different dietary needs that most can’t find at your average chain restaurant.
The Chic Guide: Who’s behind it?
Baum: Myself and my husband Timothy are the owners; however, without the support from our team and community we wouldn’t be here.
The Chic Guide: What can we find on the menu?
Baum: Our menu consists of mostly café-style food with soft pretzels, soup, salad, sandwiches, bowls, fresh juice and smoothies rounding out the menu. We have lots of plant-based options for both your veggie & meat-eater. One of our best-sellers is our Spicy Chicky Sandwich (made-from-scratch seitan patty, spring mix, tomato, sriracha mayo [also plant-based] on top of a hand-rolled pretzel bun). It tastes just like a spicy chicken sandwich from Wendy’s with a pretzel bun upgrade. We actually get lots of meat eaters that come in and try it out. Our most popular smoothie is our Dirty Banana (frozen bananas, cold brew coffee, vanilla, chocolate protein powder, peanut butter, almond milk and sea salt).
The Chic Guide: Where is The Greene Canteen located?
Baum: We’re at 134 Dayton Street in Yellow Springs. The outside of our shop is a brightly colored chevron pattern with a neon banana in the window; you can’t miss it.
The Chic Guide: What makes The Green Canteen unique?
Baum: I think we’re somewhat unique because our food is different from most food offerings in the Midwest. We strive to make the best possible products that are both tasty and do the least amount of harm to the earth. As you probably know, the restaurant industry creates quite a lot of waste and pollution. We try to use sustainable ingredients and products as much as possible and strive to limit our footprint on the earth. We’re also unique in that our sister company Brezel is a pretzel company that’s been around since 2008. So you will find glimpses of Brezel tucked into products at the Canteen. This is nice for folks who don’t live in Columbus or Cincinnati (Cincinnati closed in 2019) and want to try our pretzels.
The Chic Guide: Is there anything new on the horizon?
Baum: The long answer is yes. We’re really just getting our footing. Opening just 10 months before Covid has created a lot of challenges that we didn’t anticipate; it’s been hard to stay staffed to work towards our goals. We’re hoping once we’re fully staffed, we can begin to roll out more new menu items and new partnerships with local farmers and small businesses. My dream is to evolve into an established, employee-owned, neighborhood café. My goal is to partner with local farmers, educators and community members and to teach that healthy eating can be easy, tasty and accessible, and it can serve to replace prescription medicine in some ways. Whenever a customer tells me that changing her eating habits has helped her feel great and cut back on prescription medications, I couldn’t be happier. I’m hoping our future is filled with more success stories like these.
The Chic Guide: Where can readers go to learn more and follow along?
Baum: Visit our website thegreenecanteen.com and follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
