Chop it Up

There is this new sandwich place in the Glen Town Center that my mother had been hearing raves about and yesterday, since I had eaten Noodles & Company for three meals in a row, I tried it.

Chop it Up, on Tower Road, it a Wrap and Salad place. They have a menu of specialty wraps and salads as well as a "custom hand craft" menu for high maintenance picky eaters like me.

The store itself is nothing to look at - flooring like a warehouse, and the tables are rather uninviting. There were only three of us in there at 11:30 on a Saturday. But I imagine that if it gets really crowded in the lunch crowd you won't be able to hear yourself think.

You pick a lettuce: spinach, iceberg, romaine or (for a 50 cent upcharge) the "spring mix". Then you pick a wrap flavor and four menu items to put inside it. The portions are huge - I took half of mine home.

Here is where they get you:

A standard wrap starts at $5.75. Every single type of meat has an upcharge, starting with tofu at $1.50 and up to $3.25 for steak. Six of the eight available cheeses have an upcharge, as do various other options like mushrooms and avocado.

I ordered a wrap on the golden wheat tortilla with turkey (an extra $1.75), romaine, cheddar, cucumber and avocado (an extra $.50) with the house secret ranch. It was fine. Required a fork to eat the filling before I could pick up the actual wrap. On the first bite, I was pleased that the "secret ranch" had a kick to it. Then I realized that the kick was just black pepper and there was way too much of it. But it was decent.

They win points for having Diet Dr Pepper at the soda fountain. They lose those point for charging $1.75 for cups smaller than those in my kitchen.

I will try this place again in the fall, when soup is a better idea. I'm thinking that for carry out, splitting a wrap and getting some soup for dinner sounds pretty good. But this is not where I want to go to have a quiet lunch and read my book.