You Say Sandwich, We Say Yeah!

When Buna's opened up I thought my lunch woes were over. After a few visits, however, I have gone back to bringing my lunch more often than not. While delicious, each lunch has costed around $20, and I'm just mildly satiated.  Above is a "comfy" duck hot sandwich, which as a combination is great mixing slices of fatty duck with a fried egg and arugula. It's real picturesque, but the flavours don't actually work that well together in my mouth. The bun was also not working for me, which is too bad, because they are really trying to do something different. The tomato soup was too salty, but I think almost all soups are too salty. However, if the soup is saltier than the sandwich, that is an imbalance on the palette especially when with duck and egg, the flavour desired is pepper, or some heat, which you think the arugula would provide, but these rocket greens were immediately weighed down by the duck fat and ceased to be peppery. Big points for presentat...

Having recently returned to Rome, I was quickly reminded that sometimes the most simple is the most delicious. By the third bite, this panini sandwich picked up from the Piazza Barberini neighbourhood interrupted my thoughts with " Good Lord, this sandwich is awesome !" Taking a photo so that I may remember for possible replication here at home, this sandwich was most straightforward: a very seedy fresh wholegrain bread, Italian salami, oven-roasted yellow bell pepper, soft mozzarella, and arugula. I'm seduced by the mystery of Italy, and how everything tasted so amazing there ... is it the freshness of the olive oil? Absolutely wonderful.

I have to begin by saying that The Early Bird serves a sandwich called "The Fat Elvis" which struck fear in my heart, so I did not order it. I chickened out, and  J.D. Salami may never let me live this down. I generally tend to be the 'safe' veggie-sandwich-ordering pussy here at You Say Sandwich , and sometimes I do have a little shame about that as J.D. waxes eternal on the deliciousness of meat fillings. Note the smoked bacon on this plate. Carrying on. The Toad in a Hole was more like a Toad in a walkup apartment. Huge. Served with a knife stabbed in to help tackle the thing, a very convincing psycho-billy touch for this punk styled diner. Now that I am compiling my impressions on this towering toad palace, I wonder if the avocado tempura is supposed to be the toad, peeking out from under the bread. It sure looks like one! Regardless, there are a lot of mixed metaphors happening on my plate, but the unfortunate thing about the deep-fried avocado conce...

Expensive, very attractive looking, super fresh arugula and tasty salmon on chewy bread. This sandwich was more about quick   film festival sustenance than a dining experience. Which is perhaps what the Lightbox resto wants, as there’s often not much time between films, and I believe that more thorough evaluation would reveal a lot of glitz without achieving total sandwich satisfaction.

With every bite, I look at this sandwich deeply, trying to penetrate the meaning of it. I chew mechanically and question whether "Vegetarian" is delicious or just soggy and underwhelming. I probably ask myself this ten times and have no answers. The bread is chewy with cartoon-like grill marks. Fillings appear to be hummus, red pepper, the kind of black olives that come from a can, arugula and possible tomato or zucchini. The canned olives are many. I imagine a huge spoon scooping into an suitcase-sized vat of prepared veggies and coming up with little regard for the olive to tomato ratio in my particular sandwich. So, there are too many olives in this tightly shrink wrapped meal. That's a problem, but I'm a captive audience. Airplanes are confusing. Early morning flights too. I'd eat this again. All bets are off. 7 bucks. Plastic only.