More lunch options

Cafe Club
55 x 60 y 58
We eat lunch here twice a week. Don't speak to us we are not nice people. We eat the soup of the day that is served with microwaved bread from Costco and butter. We order a pitcher of fresh watermelon, or cantelope or payaya juice. Sometimes we order a club sandwich. We actually pay to park so we can eat this soup. Why do we eat here? I don't know. The soup is good. It's simple. It's easy. It's fast. You can sit outside. The waitress is always happy. The owner nice. You can read the local paper (which costs as much as the NY Times) for free. Don't order the daily special unless you have lost all your teeth and taste buds.

Cafe Almeda
58 x 55 y 57
It's a fight to the death to sit out back on the plastic chairs under the umbrellas. So you'll be forced to sit in the dark front room with the blaring TV tuned to the insipid soap opera. It's sometimes worth loosing the fight. I like the eggplant, hummous, tabouli and the skewered grilled lamp. I try to remember to ask them to hold the cheap vegtable oil. If I were really smart I'd carry a vial of virgin olive oil in my pocket. Order the hard and the soft pita. I've never had a bad lunch here, ever. But I sometimes with I had a gun.

Carls Jr.
Home Depot parking lot
If you are thinking that you need to eat at McDonalds or Burger King what your body is really trying to tell you is jump in a cab and to out to the suburbs and have lunch at Carl's Jr. They don't have the chili fries anymore but they do have the hand packed ice cream malts and shakes. Don't get sidetracked and stop at Checkers. Persevere and go to the end of prolongation Montejo. Across from Sam's club in the Home depot parking lot lies bliss, Carls Jr. Order. supersize, duh. move over to the counter and ask for jalapenoes, mustard, mayo, ketchup and pickles. Fill up your big plastic cup 1/2 coke 1/2 Fresa. Sit as far from the kiddie room, the smoking area and the TV as you can. But don't sit too close to the soda fountain either. Grab all the local papers. The best one has a color photo of the highway carnage on the cover. Slide into a booth and wait for your burger and fries. If the fries are cold, shed tears, they will replace them with new ones. Get a cab back the zocalo, go into the oldest cathedral of the Americas and beg for forgiveness. Take a nap.

Update Nov. 2007 RIP CARL'S JR. disappeared and Burger King took it's place. They moved to a location you'd never find and it's not the same as before. In fact it sucks!!!! But you can console yourself perhaps with the new Starbuck's which is two blocks north of home depot. Alas I can not as I've never seen the value or the charm of Starbucks....