Champaign: Potbelly
Potbelly is a sandwich shop on Green Street. It’s relatively close both to my work and to the library science building, so it’s convenient for lunch.
I have, in fact, become a regular. This is not entirely unexpected. Where food is concerned, I am not picky, and find comfort in familiarity; when I find something that meets my standards, I stick with it.
This is not to say that Potbelly does not have good sandwiches. The franchise started in an antiques shop, of all places, whose proprietors decided to start making sandwiches for their customers. Now they make very good sandwiches, and the furnishings are a bit eclectic. (Now that I’ve researched its origins, the decor makes a lot more sense.)
So I am a regular, and I always order the same thing: a vegetarian with bacon. I know that it’s odd to order a vegetarian with bacon, but I like the mushrooms and cheese on the vegetarian, and I also like bacon. And this one guy always gives me a hard time for ordering a vegetarian with bacon. (That’s how I know he’s fond of me.)
So yesterday I was at Potbelly for my vegetarian + bacon, and the guy who gives me a hard time is preparing it (big guy, by the way, lots of tattoos and a couple of earrings) and he says that he has to tell me a story. And he tells me that he’d been preparing a vegetarian sandwich for another customer, and he saw some bacon come through the grill. And he didn’t know what sandwich the bacon went with, so he asked the vegetarian lady if she’d ordered her sandwich with bacon. And she basically yelled at him for about ten minutes for suggesting that she might want meat on her vegetarian sandwich, and he tried to explain that yes, he was perfectly clear that “vegetarian” meant “no meat” but there was another customer (me) who always ordered a vegetarian with bacon but she still kept yelling at him and called him a meat fascist or something.
So I feel kind of bad for getting this guy into trouble with the vegetarian Nazi, but it’s still a funny story.
I didn’t go to Potbelly for lunch today. I’ve decided to branch out a bit, so I went down to Oodles on Sixth Street. But I’ll still be back at Potbelly next week.
1 Comments:
I love becoming a regular. When they see me and say, "you want your usual?" that makes me very very happy.
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