Fairway Cafe
A couple of weekends ago, I found myself on the upper west side looking for something to eat. Originally, the plan was to get some cookies from Levain Bakery and then eat in the park, but afternoon rain put the kibosh on that plan. Instead, my friend and I ran into Fairway to look for something to eat and ended up eating in their upstairs cafe:
I would consider moving to the upper west side just to be closer to this Fairway grocery store. I love walking around their fresh produce aisles and the store seems to carry absolutely everything (the second floor grocery store is like the same stuff as the first floor, just organic! Why does this fascinate me so much?). I’ve heard that the cafe actually serves decent food, so we stopped in to grab a quick bite to eat.
The cafe was actually setting up for dinner service, but allowed us to order from their lunch menu since we still had 10 minutes before the actual transition to dinner (white tablecloths and candles for their dinner service!). I settled on a burger with blue cheese and fries:
Cooked medium rare:
And my friend ordered the chicken salad on Irish soda bread:
We weren’t expecting much but the cheeseburger really surprised us – the meat was juicy, cooked well, and seasoned just right. Two things: 1. I wish it were larger (when I saw it, I was a little surprised at how small the actual burger was) and 2. I wish the blue cheese on the burger were larger because some bites had cheese, some were not so lucky. The chicken salad was also pretty good, but the Irish soda bread was probably the worst bread choice to go with chicken salad. Fairway’s chicken salad was not bursting with flavor, but since I was not really exposed to this “chicken salad” phenomenon until an adult, I’m intrigued by any combination of chicken, celery and mayonnaise. However, eating the semi-dry chicken salad with crumbly Irish soda bread was like chugging bread crumbs; everything was dry and kind of sandy.
We didn’t stay for dessert, but the guys that sat next to us had chocolate shakes that looked really good and Fairway has a bunch of pie slices that I’ll get on another visit.
