How I do Lunch

I have only worked at one office where no one complained about the area’s lunch options. That was near the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto. No. Wait. Actually there was one complaint: There were so many options, everyone suffered from choice anxiety come lunch hour.

Every other office in Toronto I worked in had a legion of complaints about nearby lunch options. There are too few places. Or it’s all fast food. There’s not enough fast food. It’s too ethnic. It’s not vegetarian enough. Too much gluten. Not enough gluten.

As someone who paid Toronto rent and wrestled with student loans every month my only complaint was that buying lunch every day was expensive. I usually packed a lunch and treated myself to lunch on Fridays, which, depending on the office and workload and time of year, was a patio beer lunch.

Save for the lack of beer lunches, there is little to complain about in Budapest. A good cafeteria downstairs serves hot, square meals. The price is measured by weight, so I guess it depends on your appetite. The food is good too. They even do a mean meatloaf some times. MEATLOAF!

If I’m looking to get out of the building, and want to avoid vegetables with my lunch, there is Maros Étterem, a homey neighbourhood restaurant/pub across the street from the office. They serve up a daily lunch special, usually a meat and a potato. It’s hearty, simple food that does the job for a good price. It has also turned into a post-work drinking hole for a few colleagues, where One-Drink Plans often go awry.

Maros Étterem: “The Best Restaurant in Budapest.” Just because it’s hyperbole doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

A few colleagues have taken a shine to Maros. One art director, Carlos, the unofficial mayor of Budapest, declared it the best restaurant in the city and awarded them with a certificate he created in InDesign.

But feelings in the office are mixed about the venerable Maros Étterem. Walk around the office to round up a lunch posse for Maros and you will get enthusiastic joiners or nay-sayers that scrunch their faces on the mention of Maros. Some claim to have gotten sick from the food. Others bemoan the food’s sodium content. Others inexplicably dislike its 1970s-style wallpaper. Still Maros Étterem has its fans among the agency’s workforce and while there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is definitely a good lunch to be found at Maros.

UPDATE: For lunch today we visited Maros. I had the duck liver soup to start with pork and potatoes in some kind of sauce that the Hungarian waiter could not translate into English. It was delicious.

ONE MORE UPDATE: A Lunch Wheel has appeared in the office with all the lunch choices nearby. For some reason it's been landing on the sinfully delicious fast food more often than not.