city lunches

The lunch time rush to Subway, Eat, etc. What's the alternative?

A flippant question perhaps, but if you sit and think about your lunch time habits you'll probably get depressed about the predictability of it all: Around the same time each day you run to the nearest food outlet be it a sandwich bar, café or salad bar. You review the menu giving due consideration to the special of the day - cheese, banana and mango chutney on Ciabatta - before opting for the cheese and ham baguette...like yesterday. You also order a coffee and the surly staff extract six of your hard earned pounds. The service, décor and food are no better than average but you'll almost certainly be back tomorrow.

Not only is the whole experience thoroughly dull it's also expensive and probably not very healthy. The problem for many of us is the lack of genuine alternatives in a relatively homogenous market place: the take-out lunch market is filled with franchises where the outlet in Leeds is indistinguishable from the one in London.