Lunch!
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Location:
4 Lombard Street East
Visited:
over 2 years ago
Reviewed by:
Martin McKenna
Rating:
The unhelpfully-named Lunch! is a small café on Lombard Street that would be fairly ordinary in its selection of made-to-order sandwiches, wraps, panini and baguettes, were it not for one unusual factor: the huge range of available fillings. You really can get almost anything in your sandwich from this place, either to take away or for consumption on the premises. Roast beef, pastrami, chorizo, parma ham, prawns, feta, brie, parmesan, jalapenos, hummus, semi-dried tomatoes, mango chutney, cranberry sauce—all are fair game in addition to the usual deli suspects.
The menu features salads put together from the above options (€6.95 in, €5.95 out); tomato & buffalo mozzarella, feta & pesto, and a perfectly decent chicken caesar. There’s a dozen or so sandwiches and panini, too (€6.65 in, €5.65 out): roast beef, red onion, dijon mustard and swiss cheese; or parma ham, rocket, buffalo mozzarella, fresh tomato and extra virgin olive oil, for example. Though I’m not sure that I’ll be trying the soft white bap with chicken, rocket, black olives, basil, cous cous and pesto any time too soon.
You can build your own creation too, which is a very nice option if you’re in the mood for something in particular. My panino with chorizo, feta and red onion (€6.30 in) hit the spot nicely the other day. The menu is rounded off by breakfast items, fresher and less greasy than Centra or Spar (but still greasy enough for a proper breakfast roll—€5.75 in, €4.95 out), wedges (€3.85 in, €3.50 out) and soup (€4.35 in, €3.95 out). There’s also, inexplicably, calzone and lately pies from the Millstone restaurant—including one with kangaroo.
The café itself is pretty small and you’ll be sitting close to the counter so it isn’t much of a spot to linger in. Lunch! have definitely carved out a niche for themselves with their gigantic menu and to give them their due, the ingredients are impressively fresh for such a large inventory. But I fear this large menu has to be subsidised somehow, and you won’t see much change from €8 or €9 for a panini and a coffee, which feels distinctly pre-recession.
Still, if a panini and a coffee is all you’d like to have today, Lunch! do it better than most.
