Picnic Lunch at Copia

COPIA: The American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts

Date of Visit: Saturday November 13th 2004

We ordered our delicious, healthy, wholesome and very reasonably priced picnic lunch from Copia's American Market Cafe


click to enlarge, fresh tuna sandwich served with salad. We wished the tuna had been a little more on the rare side


click to enlarge, cream of mushroom soup drizzled with a port reduction, served with salad and caraway bread. Superb soup, supremely comforting, but why did they have to go and ruin the bread with those attention-grabbing little caraway blighters?


click to enlarge, coconut sandwich cookie with chocolate fondant centre that goes all gooey and messy when left in the sun. Fingerlicking good!


click to enlarge, light and fluffy banana cake

Price for lunch $24 (two soups, one sarnie, one cookie, one cake and a cappucino). The picnic idea is a really great one, but I couldn't help thinking how nice my soup might have looked sitting in a large white ceramic bowl, not to mention to the wastefulness of using non-reusable containers. It seems Copia are aware of this issue, and have provided several different recycling receptacles, going some way to try and make amends.

Sitting outside on the cafe's picnic tables, on a really hot, beautiful, Autumnal afternoon, overlooking Copia's attractive formal gardens, with a tasty lunch should have been a perfect and tranquil occasion. Unfortunately, the group of four, middle aged men and women seated closest to us had other plans. They thought it might be a good idea to hold a conversation in which each of them felt their own opinion had more merit than everyone else's. Consequently, the number of decibels each of them used to put accross their own point of view were clearly in triple figures. I would be surprised if you couldn't hear their dreary discussion in San Francisco. Why can't people just be nice and quiet, when they eat? I vote for more 'hushed tones' in American restaurants.

Picnic Lunch at Copia