The Newsroom won't be making any sandwich headlines

Teddy Hobbins

The Newsroom's California Panini: Thank god for the bacon

It's a gorgeous early summer Friday on Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis, and thousands of analysts and go-getters are pouring out of the surrounding buildings in search of one thing: Lunch. You could spend a summer's worth of power lunches exploring your options on the mall, and the Newsroom seems like a reasonable choice to start it all off.

Its menu is impressively large, featuring a staggering number of sandwich options ranging from cubanos to tuna melts to Italian beef. The California panini seemed a natural choice for such a sunny day and featured the tremendously appealing combination of cheese, bacon, and avocado. I'm not sure if that arrangement is all that authentic to California, but if it is, I just may need to hop on a plane. Those ingredients on their own could have made for a satisfying lunch, but of course there was more to it, which unfortunately was stumbling point of this creation. The sandwich was supposed to be served on wheat, but it arrived on toasted rosemary bread, which would have been a nice upgrade if it hadn't been lifeless and as dry as an old sponge. The kitchen uses little to no oil when grilling the bread, which your arteries will appreciate, but the gesture really impairs the texture of the sandwich. Concurrently, the grilled chicken could have really rounded things off, and although it was juicy, it was totally devoid of flavor. Sysco-fabulous to say the least. It was as if it had never been exposed to an open flame, and the inherited flavors from the grill would have been an amazing accompaniment to the lushness of the avocado and the saltiness of the bacon and cheese.

Sandwich Rating: Good, not great. Lunch would have been powerless if the avocado, bacon, and cheese weren't there for the rescue.

Epic Sandwich copyright 2010 by Teddy Hobbins