Panera Bread arrived in Mobile as one of a new breed of chain restaurants that seemed, on paper, to have everything: a handsome building, a comfortable interior, a long menu of light meals, breads and pastries, and free Wi-Fi that had made it a natural office for anyone with a laptop and an hour to spend.
Our anonymous dining correspondent visited the Schillinger Road location in the spring of 2008. He found the building attractive, the staff pleasant — several young women who appeared to be of late high school or early college age — and almost nothing else to recommend.
The sandwich
Ordering at the counter, he chose the Asiago Roast Beef, dressed with lettuce, tomato, cheese and a horseradish sauce, served on an Asiago cheese demi roll. His dining companion took a half Chipotle Chicken Panini with a side salad. Each order came with a bag of potato chips.
“My sandwich was, without a doubt, one of the worst roast beef sandwiches I have ever had ….. ever,” he wrote, and then itemized the reasons.
The cold beef tasted, to him, as though it had been cooked long before and left in a refrigerator far too long. The cheese was cold and chewy. The lettuce was lettuce. The tomato slices were too cold and too crisp, and not, in his judgment, from a good tomato. There was only a hint of the horseradish sauce. The bread — at a restaurant whose name is Bread — was tough and difficult to bite or chew.
The chips, he concluded, were the best item in the basket.
Hungry as he was, he could manage only half of it. His companion said little about the panini, but a portion of that, too, went into the trash bin on the way to the car.
A pattern, not an off day
This was not our critic’s first disappointment there. On an earlier visit he had ordered the low-fat chicken noodle soup and left much of it in the bowl; it was heavy with sodium, and tasted like it.
He was more generous about breakfast. The pastries he found quite tasty — not healthy fare, he conceded, but good enough — and singled out the cinnamon rolls as large, calorie-laden and tasty.
The dining room
The sharpest criticism had nothing to do with the food. Our critic was in the restaurant around 6 p.m., well after the lunch rush and before the evening one — the slack hour when a dining room ought to be at its best.
The floor was dirty, with used napkins and pieces of bread still scattered under the tables. Some tabletops needed wiping. The trash bins were overflowing. And the staff, he observed, were standing around.
He was careful about where he placed the blame. The young employees, he wrote, were charming and nice. What was missing was “adult supervision to show them how to keep a restaurant clean” — a criticism aimed squarely at whoever was, or was not, managing the shift.
The verdict
Panera had grown from its St. Louis origins to more than 1,200 locations by 2008, two of them in Mobile and another in Spanish Fort, and its arrival was widely welcomed as a sign that the Gulf Coast market had matured enough to attract the fast-casual chains.
Our critic wanted to like it. “This is an attractive restaurant staffed with very nice young ladies. I would prefer to give it a good review,” he wrote. “However, I could find few redeeming values at this eatery.”
Would he return? Yes — for a cinnamon roll. The next time he wanted roast beef, he said, he would go back to Zorba the Greek for a beef shawarma. And the next time his companion wanted a panini, they would try a little place on Cottage Hill that he had been told does one very well. He promised to report back.
Our restaurant critic dined at his own expense, remained anonymous to the staff, and reviewed only restaurants he visits in the ordinary course of life.