Panera Bread: quality food, quality service
Written: Jul 13 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fresh delicious food, fast friendly service
Cons: A little pricey
The Bottom Line: Check out Panera for quality breakfast and lunch food choices: fresh bagels, soups, sandwiches, salads, breads and more!
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| jnlynnq's Full Review: Panera Bread |
The Panera Bread restaurant that I usually visit is located in downtown Boulder, CO. Ever since it opened about a year ago right around the corner from where I work, it has become one of the most popular breakfast and lunch spots for almost everyone in the company. After going there for lunch a few times, I was completely hooked.
I'll throw in the negative part right in the beginning: Panera is somewhat pricey compared to some other deli and sandwich places in the area (being a student on a budget, I tend to notice even a couple of dollars of a difference).
Ok, now on to the good part :)
Panera bakes all of their bread & bakery products on site, fresh every day. Aside from using the bread for sandwiches, they sell it by the loaf, too (I'll never buy "fresh baked bread" from a grocery store again!). Panera has about 15 different kinds of bread (french, nine grain, rye...), and their signature bread is sourdough. They also have pastries, various croissants, a dozen or so kinds of sourdough bagels, and danishes. I have tasted a few types of bagels there, and every time the bagels were consistently fresh and delicious, with or without cream cheese.
At their cafe, they have various soups, salads and sandwiches. As I already mentioned, they use their own fresh-baked bread for sandwiches.
Soups: 10+ various kinds, from broccoli cheddar to chicken chili to Boston clam chowder. Soup selection changes daily, with additional soups available seasonally. My favorite part: you can order your soup in a sourdough bread bowl. Tastes absolutely fantastic! (especially in winter, when it's freezing outside--this is, after all, Colorado!)
Salads: about 5-10 types of salads, depending on their seasonal offerings. They have your standard salad selections (classic cafe salad, caesar salad), but they also recently added some very interesting seasonal salads, for example, Strawberry Poppyseed salad (Romaine lettuce, fresh strawberries, pineapple bits, mandarin orange slices, blueberries, pecans, poppyseed dressing).
Personally, my favorite is their Greek salad: Romaine lettuce, tomatoes, feta cheese, red onions, peperoncini, Kalamata olives, cracked pepper, and Greek dressing. Every time I have ordered a salad at Panera, it tasted great and overall seemed very fresh. At Panera, I have never gotten a salad with brown wilted lettuce and soggy onions.
And last, but certainly not least:
Sandwiches
Panera serves hot pannini, specialty and cafe sandwiches. Regular cafe sandwiches range in price from $4.29 - $5.69 (I think), the panninis and specialty sandwiches are a little more expensive. You can check the complete sandwich menu at Panera's website (www.panerabread.com). Again, one thing that comes to mind is freshness: you can just tell that the meats and veggies are fresh. The lettuce is green, the onions are crisp, and the mayo tastes like, well, mayo (in my experience with some other restaurants, it's not necessarily a given).
In conclusion, I think their service deserves a mention. We walked into Panera during lunch rush, and there were at least fifteen people in line in front of us. It took us less than 10 minutes to get through the line to order our food, and another five or seven minutes to receive our order, fresh and delicious as always. If that's not quality service, I don't know what is.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
jnlynnq
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Location: Boulder, CO
Reviews written: 23
Trusted by: 17 members
About Me:
An MBA student who enjoys ditching class to go skiing in Colorado's majestic Rocky Mountains!
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