![]() We split the aforementioned Cobb, then traded bites of the flaky chicken pot pie and the cheesy, crusty, open-faced croque monsieur. Those seeking a Cheesecake Factory-style hardcover page-turner are likely to be disappointed, but if a deliciously simple crock of French onion soup, a well-appointed Cobb salad or a straightforward chicken salad croissant tickles your fancy, there’s more than enough here to satisfy. Fair enough.Īs noted, this is not an enormous lunch menu. We’d get to that calorie-laden treasure trove in due time, but we felt compelled to follow that classic motherly advice to first finish our meal. We opted for a spot upfront on an anonymous Wednesday afternoon, dividing our attention between the pedestrian and vehicular traffic on Washington Street before us and the ever-present nutritional siren song of the ridiculous pastry case over our shoulders. Because no drive-thru means folks have to actually come through the door and sit down at a table and take in the surroundings of the place to have a proper meal. Many a suburban restaurateur has gone out of business for such a deficiency, after all, this is actually the key to the whole endeavor. A potential deal-breaker for some prospective customers. To reiterate, and this must be fully understood upfront, there is no drive-thru window at Le Chocolat. to 2:30 p.m.) and selections are somewhat limited, it is nevertheless a small gesture of graciousness amid the gridlock and exhaust, and a welcome addition to a dining scene that is dominated by those places catering to meals behind wheels. While both the hours (Tuesday through Friday, 11 a.m. Long a purveyor of only decadent sweets and rich coffee and cocoa drinks-not that there was ever, for one moment, anything even remotely wrong with that-Le Chocolat du Bouchard recently expanded its menu to include a number of lunch options. So leave it to the French-or at least a French-inspired dessert shop-to try and restore some sense of sanity and respect to the lunch hour here in Naperville. In other words, for all of its perceived expedience, the drive-thru effectively killed the leisurely sit-down lunch by encouraging diners to remain locked into hustle-bustle mode within their solitary confines, treating their moveable feasts as more or less the same anonymous fuel they pump into their gas tanks.īut the French know a little something about both dining and making the most of leisure time (as proponents of extended sabbaticals over compressed “vacations” for example). ![]() ![]() There are likely more than a few gradations of opinion to consider between those two poles, of course, but as far as the midday repast known as suburban lunch is concerned, let’s be frank-its death warrant was dictated into a scratchy speaker box and delivered through one of those very windows. Depending on one’s perspective, the drive-thru window is either the single greatest convenience ever devised or the portal to the end of civilized human interaction as we know it.
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