Lovely Lunch Spot: Zanny’s Cafe

I am on a ‘try all the cafés in my neighborhood’ kick. I stopped into Zanny’s (http://www.zannyscafe.com/) on 108th and Columbus today for lunch. The place is very bright during the day due to big windows, making this spot a great place to sit and read. The music selection this afternoon was not something that I knew, but it was excellent. My lunch was awesome. I ordered the Health Wrap, which has mixed greens, cucumber, tomatoes, alfalfa sprouts, olives, brie and mango chutney. Even with the large amount of brie cheese that I consumed, the title of the wrap made me feel like I was ordering smart. One complaint I have is that the wrap did not have many cucumber, tomato, or olive pieces (okay, so I don’t really like olives, so that didn’t bother me very much, but if I did like olives that would have been disappointing, and I was legitimately saddened by the lack of cucumber and tomato). The wrap contained mostly lettuce and brie cheese. However, all is forgiven due to the AMAZING mango chutney and the way that the mango chutney and the brie cheese tasted together on the tongue. Mmmm!!!! I would definitely order this again if there weren’t a ton of other things on the menu that I now want to try. It came with chips or a side salad. I took the side salad, and went for the carrot ginger salad dressing. The salad included more than just lettuce, something that often is not the case when sandwiches come with sides that tend to be more like garnishes. This was actually a small salad of its own right. The carrot ginger dressing was a bit too spicy for me due to lots of shreds of fresh ginger throughout the dressing. I really like ginger and this was even too much for me. However, the salad and the dressing tasted really fresh and light, which was very refreshing during this summer afternoon.

In response to some reviews of this place that I have read, I want to say that I went at 12:30 in the afternoon and the place was busy (it actually was busier by 1:15), but not so busy that I couldn’t comfortably sit at a table and read. Furthermore, there was no time in the little over an hour that I was there reading when I felt that I should leave because the place was so packed that I was either taking a seat away from another customer without buying anything else myself or too distracted to do my reading.