Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Bakery Review - Panera Bread

The other week I noticed a new sign near the Walmart at Square One, a section of the land next to the mall is filling up with some new restaurants and stores (Boston Pizza, Running Room, Spence Diamonds), this one said Panera Bread. Intrigued, I pointed it out to my beautiful Bride, who also expressed interest, then we both promptly forgot about. That is, until about two weeks later, when we, again, saw the sign, this time we thought to finally check it (I guess we were hungrier then). We weren't disappointed, at least initially.

Panera Bread is an American-based chain of what might be called "fast casual" food; each franchise is a bakery-café, serving breads, baked goods, soups, sandwiches, coffee and drinks, plus more.



We initially tried their wild blueberry scone (as you can see in the picture), which we liked very much and have since bought again, and again, and a loaf of multi-grain bread. The bread was okay, and we did experience an issue with it, that was promptly rectified (so kudos for their customer service!).

We have not tried any of their soup (they feature about nine kinds of soup, you can have them in sourdough bread bowls) or sandwiches, only their baked goods. We always seem to arrive too late for their orange scone, which my beautiful Bride wants to sample. We did not like their sunflower bread, made from white whole wheat, it was way too soft inside, but that's likely to be a problem with the less gluten content of the white whole wheat. We did like their honey whole wheat bread, quite tasty, and a good sandwich bread.

Overall, we like it enough to go back again, it is a little expensive for some of their products (not unlike StarBucks), and we want to try eating there one day.

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