Zen, and the art of finding an affordable lunch in South Brisbane.

Until I couple of months ago I was a city girl. I loved working smack bang in the middle of the cbd because I could always get something cheap and delicious for lunch, aka I never had to make lunch. In July, I moved offices to South Brisbane... and not even a good part of South Brisbane, I am in the middle of nowhere, it's a good 15-20 minute walk to southbank! I have been bringing my lunch to work, which is ok, because it's usually leftovers and I'm a pretty rad cook (high self esteem, isn't it), but sometimes I forget to bring it, or don't make enough for left overs, or can't be bothered making a sandwich or salad to take. I hate frozen meals, so I have to venture out and find something to eat, and this is usually punishing on the wallet.

On Thursday I forgot my lunch, and had a strict 30 minute timeframe to fit it into, so had to venture not far from work to get something (or get a packet of 2 minute noodles from the vending machine, but they only had the 99% fat free ones, yeurgh). I decided to hit up Raw Space Cafe which is only about a 5 minute walk from my office. After perusing their display cabinet of overpriced sandwiches and limp looking salads I decided on a Chicken Turkish, toasted. $8.50! Seemed like a bit of a jip compared to the awesome sandwich place near my old office where I could get basically the fanciest sandwich every for $5. Anyhoo, I was given this blue buzzer which started beeping, flashing, and vibrating madly after the 12 minutes it took to toast my fricking sandwich, and it was already made up, so I don't know why it took so long.

After what seemed like an eternity (but as mentioned above was only in fact 12 minutes) it was ready to go! I grabbed it and hot footed it back to my office to scarf it down in 8 minutes.



Ooooh brown paper bag, totally worth the exxy price.



The filling included some actually really tasty chicken, baby spinach, some kind of melty cheese, and some tomato-y pesto-y tapenade-y stuff. It was a really tasty sandwich, but it wasn't very big and I was still hungry after I woofed it down so quickly. I think I probably would have been satisfied if it was 2 bites bigger. I like to measure my food in bites.

So, at $8.50, bit of a rip off I reckon. Not that I should be complaining because it's certainly not the biggest lunch ripoff scam around my woods! Friday's lunch was an even bigger jip, but that's a whole other blog post.

I also occasionally get a coffee from here, and it's passable. Except for the time they gave me soy milk (WTF???) and for that I punished them by not buying coffee there for 3 weeks. I'm sure they were very concerned.

Raw Space Cafe
99 Melbourne Street
South Brisbane
www.rawspace.org
(it's also a gallery)