Quickie Cubicle Lunch Review: Marche

Somehow, my lunch reviews have become rather popular -- or so people tell me. Maybe it's just three people desperate for diversion, but still....

But I'm wondering if the fact that people are actually reading about what I had for lunch is making me seek out lunches that are... well, bad for me.

I've been a bad, bad girl today. I had to be in East Nashville, dropping off some art, and thought: "Hmmmm... Marche would be a yum-fest."

So I stopped at Marche's Artisian Foods. It's an almost unbearably trendy temple to food in the Five Points area, and only the fact that the food is in fact fabulous prevents it from being pretentious. The interior is shabby chic French provencial, where the waiters are all unemployed musicians and starving artists.

It's the kind of place where you'll pay $8 (plus tax) for a BLT -- but it will be the best BLT you have ever tasted. It will be the Sistine Chapel of BLTs.

It will start with fresh baked sourdough bread, toasted lightly, with generous, thick-cut smoked applewood bacon... and sun-dried tomatoes that are to die for, and fresh tender greens. There's some kind of dressing on it, I think, something light. I'm always too busy eating and sighing in bliss to take note.

But today, I was lured by the Cheese Steak -- soft, fresh foccacia bread, still slighty dusty from the oven, with Boarshead Roast Beef, roasted red and green peppers, carmelized onions, and cheese that I think may be brie.

Yum. I'm a sucker for food lovingly, artistically crafted... a welcome antidote to the recently-frozen, mass-produced and mundane crap that passes for food in most restaurants.

I suppose I wasn't as bad as I could have been. Did I mention... creme brulle? Madeleines? Chocolate Expresso Cake with Caramel and Cream Cheese frosting? Butternut Squash Cake with Apple Mousse frosting? Every kind of bread you can imagine. Chocolate croissants. Baguettes. Stuff you could just sit down with, along with a pound of butter, and eat until you die a happy piggie.