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One Fifty Ate now 158 Pickett St. Cafe
(207) 799-8998
158 Benjamin W. Pickett Street, South Portland
Hospitality-Friendly counter service in an informal room and backyard
Open for breakfast and lunch Tuesday through Sunday 7-2
Lunch items $4.50 to $6.50
The coffee reigns supreme, even under the assault of ice, and could suck you into a slice of the cake sitting on the counter, or one of the other great pastries everyone else was snatching up as you watched anxiously during lunch. Cream puffs and cheesecake show up at night.
A cold rice-noodle salad was on the seasonal menu in summer, with carrots, cabbage, and onions in a peanut dressing ($5.50). And the plain egg salad with a touch of mustard was great on that levain.
Sandwiches include turkey with green goddess dressing, local greens, and sunflower seeds ($6.50), or salami, provolone, and tapenade ($6.25). I still hunger for the smoked turkey with pear chutney that showed up on the chalkboard one fall. A cold rice-noodle salad was on the seasonal menu in summer, with carrots.
The bagels are renowned. Misshapen, big, and chewy, they wear poppy seeds, sesame seeds, and "everything," including fennel and sunflower seeds. People who want to buy a dozen or more are sent down the road to the branch bakery and deli in Willard Square (see page xxx), because the café needs a selection to make the bagel and egg, bagel and egg and cheese, and bagel and egg and ham and cheese ($4.50) sandwiches that light up the breakfast hours. There's also Lefty's Granola Funk Express ($3.50). Come lunch, 11:30-2, soups are served with a big chunk of bread according to the lights in the kitchen, always right on. The bakery makes and sells country white and wheat levain every day, anadama on Tuesday, organic potato on Wednesday, honey wheat on Thursday, and a baker's choice on Friday.
This place was my refuge from everything harsh and demanding one year when I ate lunch here two or three times every week. Although I might have started going because the soup's price was right, I ended up staying because the cooks were showing my palette all kinds of things it needed to know, like the splendor of big chunks of salty bacon in a thick black bean soup, or the taste of the best tomatoes when they first come off the vines this far north, sometime in August.
My absolute favorite lunch place, with great soup and fine sandwiches