Lunch Around the Corner

Corner Bakery Cafe
1019 Westwood Blvd
Westwood, CA 90024
(310) 824-1314
http://www.cornerbakerycafe.com
$7 or so for a sandwich

I've been enthralled with the idea of microliterature, four word movie reviews and twelve word novels. I think that restricting yourself to only four words allows for some amazing bit of creativity. Plus the puns come out en masse and God knows I love wordplay. So from now on, I'm going to try to sum up my reviews in four words or less as the title to this entry suggests.

Corner Bakery Cafes are a chain of restaurants similar to Le Pain Quotidien. The comfortable seating and atmosphere brings a varied customer base of students, business people and bored Bel-Air housewives eager to gossip about the summer after dropping their kids off for the first week of school. When I used to work in Westwood and order my lunch to go, Corner Bakery was usually my top choice. We all know how much food suffers when it is not served immediately or whether it'll even survive the journey from restaurant to desk. But it's hard to completely dismantle a sandwich in a to-go container. My favorites are the DC Chicken Salad on Steakhouse Rye (pictured below) and the Chicken Pesto on Ciabatta. The chicken salad has large identifiable chunks of chicken with light dressing and raisins. The crisp green apples add variety in texture, a satisfying crunch to an otherwise squishy salad. My one complaint about the sandwich is its difficulty in eating. I found myself reaching for the fork to finish off the remaining pieces of chicken. The chicken pesto on the other hand, doesn't suffer from this lack of cohesiveness.


DC Chicken Salad Sandwich

I bought my lunch for take-out today, explaining the photo taken at my desk. First off, it was 10:30 in the morning and I wanted to save it for later. Secondly, I feel awkward eating in restaurants alone. The only exception is fast food which I can purchase, consume and be out the door before the other patrons realize that I'm by myself. The appeal of Corner Bakery is not its uniqueness, there are a million other bakery cafes, but in its familiarity. A wide chain like this must be popular to continue expanding. The public has spoken, and Corner Bakery is in.