Last week, just after noon, one of my colleagues shuffled out of his office, shoulders hunched, a little crestfallen. He stared off into the distance, at nothing in particular and muttered, “What kind of disgusting crap food am I going to pick up at the disgusting crap food court today?”

This is not an uncommon scenario. There are certain areas in this city that appear to be purposely designed to keep those who work 9 to 5 locked in a malnourished daze. It's a cunning strategy: if you feed the drones nothing but shredded iceberg lettuce, sandwiches with wooly tomatoes, pasta salads made with seven-year-old white vinegar, and the odd bowl of low-protein gruel, chances are they will be too weak and uninspired to leave their desks, and too depressed to believe in concepts such as “fun” and “leisure.”

Such is not the case for those who work in the Yonge and Bloor area. Tucked away on Hayden Street is Camros – a vegetarian takeout place that serves excellent organic, Persian-influenced dishes to a loyal clientele and recently celebrated its first birthday. If there were more restaurants like Camros scattered across the grid, there is an excellent chance city-wide productivity would rise by several percentage points.

It's a small, clean, efficient space, done up in pale bright colours and blond woods. Behind the glass counter are steaming chafing dishes full of stews and trays of salads, all of which scream “GET A LOAD OF MY PHYTOCHEMICALS, CUBE-DWELLER!” If you have hands, or at the very least an implement that allows you to point, the transaction is quite simple: choose a two-, three- or four-item combo, point at what you want, pay and you're on your way.

The salads are all bracingly fresh and carefully dressed. A kale salad is glossed with a marinade of apple cider vinegar, fresh oregano and a squeeze of lemon – taking the tough chewiness out of what can be an unpleasantly fibrous green. It's tossed with a bit of grated crimson beet and carrot. Beets and carrots also show up as headliners in their own salad, sweetened judiciously with thin slices of Granny Smith apple and tiny nuggets of toasted walnuts. The best of the lot is the quinoa salad, tossed with green lentils and the smallest florets of broccoli, made rich and unctuous with a squirt of homemade tahini dressing, lightened with quality olive oil and a bit of apple cider vinegar.

The stews are formulaic (a pulse, a vegetable, a temperate addition of earthy spices), but carefully constructed nonetheless. Lentils are ubiquitous: a red dal is zinged up with sour tamarind, lemon, onions and garlic. A split yellow lentil dal is mixed with potatoes, lime, sweet plums and an underlying note of cumin. The ghorme sabzi is wonderfully fragrant (and so vitamin-rich it should be used in hospitals as a cataplasm for battered livers): tender red kidney beans poke out of a smooth dark green slurry of puréed spinach.

The healthfulness of Camros' menu is related to its hypothetical link to productivity, at least in my imagination. It is mind-boggling to think what might happen if food courts across Toronto had their very own Camros. I could be in a position to quit my job to build jet packs, and you would be finishing your blueprints for the world's first time machine. Imagine!

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