on the cheap

With Bob Marley on the jukebox and grilled tofu on the menu, the Blue Shirt Café makes no bones about its neo-hippie, health-food aesthetic. Standing in stark contrast to the working-class pizza joint next door, the Blue Shirt delivers cheap (there’s nothing over $7), healthful eats with a pan-ethnic flair — it’s a little bit of Lonely Planet in the heart of Davis Square.

While the Blue Shirt offers traditional turkey sandwiches and Tex-Mex burritos, its specialty (as the sign outside boasts) is quirky " gourmet wrap sandwiches " that bring highbrow ingredients — jasmine rice, caramelized onions, goat cheese — to standard lunch fare. The Indonesian-tuna-salad sandwich ($4.95) took that experimental ethic a little too far; stocked with plump raisins, the " Indonesian " tuna was heavily spiced and sweetened to form a cloying yellow paste. Far better was the sesame chicken wrap ($5.75), a hefty burrito-esque creation that mixed soft jasmine rice, crispy carrots, grilled chicken, and a delicate sesame-soy aïoli. The Blue Shirt Salad ($4.25) continued the mix-’n’-match theme, combining a healthy portion of mixed greens with balsamic vinaigrette, clumps of goat cheese, toasted walnuts, and poached cinnamon-spiced pears.

A long selection of smoothies and fresh-squeezed juices takes up a good third of the menu. Skipping over the short selection of " Remedies " — vitamin-heavy combinations like " Immunity Power " and " Cold Fighter " — we ordered with taste, not health, in mind. " Apple-a-Day " ($3.25) was a tangy, Asian-inspired take on plain ol’ apple cider, punched up with ginger, lemon juice, and a hint of cinnamon. The thick pink " Soy-Milk Craze " ($3.95), a smoothie of bananas, strawberries, raspberry sorbet, protein powder, and soy milk, included a free booster shot of echinacea, the taste of which thankfully was masked by the sweet, frothy drink. Who said health food can’t be good food?