Hedonia

Scala's Bistro

I don't make a habit of frequenting hotel restaurants. In the world at large, hotel restaurants are the last resort, the option when everything else is too far away, or closed, or when you've been traveling for 15 hours solid and you're just too tired to give a flying fig.

But sometimes there is a difference between a hotel restaurant and a restaurant that happens to be in a hotel. Take, for example, Saha, an independent restaurant in a boutique hotel that serves up reasonably good food and even a modicum of style. This is no Howard Johnson's.

Scala's Bistro fits somewhere in between. It is, technically, a hotel restaurant. Both it and the hotel that looms above it, the Sir Francis Drake, are owned by the same parent corporation, Kimpton Group. And while there is a certain thread of consistency to all Kimpton properties, there is rarely homogeneity. There is also, often, quality.

DPaul and I have eaten at Scala's probably a couple dozen times over the years. It's become a regular lunch haunt for us, a pleasant way station en route to an afternoon of downtown shopping. (And a lunch destination it shall remain ... our dinner experiences have been less enthralling.) I also occasionally drop in and order a plate at the bar if I have somewhere to be in the area in the evening after work.

Scala's closed for one month this past summer for a "major renovation." Such words strike terror into the heart of a restaurant loyalist. "Renovation" can mean anything from a quick coat of paint to a total teardown, including a complete staff change. It can destabilize an otherwise perfectly functional operation. We hadn't been to Scala's since the reopening, and were unsure what to expect. It was time to revisit.

Lunch-in: The cure for the common work lunch

Thank you, Daily Candy. For once you sent me something I actually care about, something that's not a babydoll dress, pricey faux bauble or ribbony high-heeled shoe. Thank you for rescuing me from the drudgery that is lunch up in Levi's Plaza area. In short, thank you for turning me on to Lunch-In.

To give you a little color on the situation: I've worked in the Levi's Plaza area, off and on, since 1992. Lunch options are thin on the ground up there. You've got a respectable but overpriced market and deli, a more reasonably priced but slightly skanky deli, and two takeaway sandwich counters attached to medium-high-end restaurants. This is enough to tantalize the palate for a few days, maybe even a matter of weeks, but over the course of years it gets tired. Really tired.

This week I facilitated a three-day consultancy at the office, with attendees in from New York, Los Angeles and Boston. If our takeaway options are slim, the delivery options are worse: Il Fornaio sandwich platters, Specialty's cold cut platters and North Beach pizza. Yawn. So day one it was Specialty's, day two it was Il Fornaio ... and I refuse to feed out-of-town consultants delivery pizza. Lunch-In to the rescue!

Lunch-In proprietress Gina Faiola offers a nice alternative to the typical sandwich-and-salad fare you get from the major caterers in town, although it is still basically a sandwich-and-salad affair. (And soup, don't forget the soup.) With sandwiches like Moroccan tuna on baguette with hard-boiled egg, olives, potato and spicy harissa and pork tenderloin on ciabatta with onion pickles, arugula and aioli, it's a definite step up.

For my crowd, I ordered a mixed batch of combos with a roughly even distribution of each type of sandwich plus some cookies. If I've learned anything about long meetings, it's that cookies go a long way toward abating the mid-afternoon crankies. The combos arrived assembled in their own brown bags, neatly stapled shut and marked. The presentation was efficient, professional and neat, and the food was downright good. Nary a bite was left behind, and the feedback was more than positive.

My one complaint: The soup comes refrigerated, ready to microwave. Ten individual containers of soup are really hard to nuke when an entire corporation shares one sole dorm-sized microwave, but I suppose that says more about the company's appliance problems than anything else. I would have preferred soup delivered hot in thermal containers, but then I suppose the price would not stay so reasonable.

Sadly, there is a $50 minimum, which is all that keeps me from ordering this for myself every single day until I get burned out on it. Guess I need to call more all-day meetings.