Breadline

The weekly Friday special pork bbq sandwhich is outstanding.

They’ve got good bread, they’ve got an interesting space, and they’ve got good service. It’s just hard for me to find a sandwich that doesn’t have something I don’t want on it. I go, and I look at this short menu of really complicated and interesting hot sandwiches, and find myself longing for something simple, warm, and not be fried or grilled or have mustard on it. An example of complexity: The grilled cheese has five cheeses in it. It is staggering.

I love the concept. I just wish I could eat there more often.

This place is built on bread, and it seems they have a solid foundation indeed. You can buy loaves, you can buy sandwiches, you can buy soup.

It is a true gourmet sandwich menu, not a traditional same-all-the-year deli sandwich list. What they have fresh is what they have available. They also earned my respect for the uncompromising beverage case: they don’t have cola, and equally amazingly, they do have half-bottles of French wine.

The pace is inevitably a little hectic, even off-peak. The menu is fairly broad, and your order is taken by someone who then wanders off to the appropriate part of the well-equipped display kitchen to prepare it. But they’ve allocated enough space to the kitchen that the staff can work properly. If you want ruthless assembly-line efficiency, I’m sure a Subway is nearby.

Owner Mark Furstenberg was the founder of Marvelous Market, and just as with the market, Breadline sets a scope and works within it. It’s more than just a deli, but it’s without any pretension. It doesn’t cut any corners on the food, but it doesn’t have gratuitous ritzy flourishes either. It works.