ottawa foodies

I went to the new press café – that opened in ‘Vitae Mine’s’ place – for lunch today (O’conner and Laurier). Last time I ate at presse café I was in Montréal, in October 2011. I remember eating a sautéed mushroom and goat cheese sandwich, which was really good. So I ordered the same thing today.

For 10.16, you get a decent quality, rather large sandwich, and two salads of your choice. The bread (baguette) they use is really hearty, and you can definitely taste some sourdough goodness in there. The sandwich wasn’t as good as I remembered it, but subjectivity and expectation may have skewed my judgement.

The mushrooms did not have a particularly deep flavour, but anything with goat cheese on it is usually delicious. No major complaints and I enjoyed the sandwich.

The salads though, sucked today. They look gorgeous, but holy salt! I would likely blame this on a mistake of the person preparing the salads but shit, trying to give me sodium poisoning? I had the fatoush, and a pickled artichoke salad. They both looked good; were flavoured very nicely with all sorts of herbs, but I couldn’t get over the salt and ultimately threw them out.

Oh and, they mixed the fried pitas in with the dressing, and thus the pita became soggy and gross.

Considering other lunch options around, I would say Presse Café is pretty good quality and value. I’d stay away from the chicken breast options (more sisco frankenchicken), but the roasted veggies, and deli meat varieties all look fine.

Unfortunately, I had take away today, or else I would have asked the staff to taste the salads. After they inevitably wince from the salt overdose, I would kindly ask them, a) please remove this salted crap from your display case, and b) please substitute with something easy on my heart.

I’ll give this particular location another shot, cause the sandwich was good. If I go for salad again, I would consider eating in the restaurant so I could test the salad out before getting back to my office.

I will cautiously recommend Presse Café, but it’s a chain, so this review obviously doesn’t speak for other locations.

There's a Presse Cafe in the CBC Building, which is where my office is at the moment. Feeling too lazy to walk to Bridgehead at lunch, I grabbed an Americano here. I know that espresso is a personal thing, but I will say that it's not quite as good as Bridgehead's, but far better, smoothly, and more deeply flavoured than that of Starbucks. In a pinch, it'll do just fine.