Things Looking Up on the Mid-Price Downtown Lunch Scene

Yes, you can eat lunch in downtown San Diego.

Among the crush of moderate and medium-price eateries that have come along to supplement the business district’s formal restaurants and fast-food feederies is a storefront-size establishment on Broadway that claims to serve the largest sandwiches in town.

Joseph’s, an animated bar-delicatessen-restaurant situated mid-block between 7th and 8th avenues, does in fact pile on the corned beef, hot pastrami, turkey breast, liverwurst and egg salad until the mere sight of one of these massive sandwiches dissolves any plans you may have made for the evening meal.

Not for Faint of Appetite

Salads also are heaped, rather than composed, in bowls that look to be at least 2 quarts in capacity--the house specialty combines diced turkey, corned beef and cheeses with tomatoes, olives and egg on greens. But, even on the more demure side, the single-item salads consist of beds of lettuce nearly hidden beneath layerings of albacore, broiled chicken breast or sliced turkey. This is not, in other words, a place for the faint of appetite.

The restaurant offers a lively, noisy scene for an informal lunch, and provides the bonus of seating at the bar, which may be the only seating available for guests who arrive between noon and 1 p.m.

Taking a seat at the bar does not imply the obligation to drink, although the food certainly arrives slowly enough to allow a leisurely pre-meal nip. Much noise has been made in recent national and Southern California food articles about the return of the martini, a phenomenon that does not seem to have surfaced here yet. In any case, the martini can be a challenge one would rather defer; what is true at Joseph’s is that the bartender makes a fine Manhattan, that old-fashioned cousin to the martini that requires whiskey, sweet vermouth, a dash of bitters and, like it or not, a maraschino cherry.

Lunch can be a bit slow in arriving, but does make a statement when it finally shows up. One of the few semiformal entrees, a roasted half-chicken, was neither more nor less than what was expected, a fairly meaty bird cooked to the juicy stage (it was in fact rare near the bones), seasoned with a modest American hand and garnished with a few plainly cooked vegetables. This was simple but substantial and satisfactory fare, and it seemed quite a bargain at $4.95.

The sandwiches, priced mostly at $4.95 for single-item fillings and a dollar higher for triple-decker combos (turkey, salami, Swiss cheese, cole slaw and Russian dressing is a typical example) also seem major bargains when the sheer volume of food they offer is factored in.

But there are instances in which the quantity versus quality issue comes to the fore, as in a groaningly large hot pastrami sandwich that featured unappetizingly fatty meat. Both corned beef and pastrami need to be trimmed before slicing, a step with which Joseph’s mistakenly dispensed.

The menu at Downtown Johnny Brown’s in the Community Concourse is considerably narrower than at Joseph’s, but is its equal in terms of price and portion sizes. This casual but comfortable burger saloon puts out a hefty lunch and features the added option of outdoor dining.

Johnny Brown’s restricts itself to cooking on the mesquite grill, which may sound a little tedious, although the range of choices is sufficiently broad. The three main choices are hamburgers, grilled chicken breasts and the fish of the day, with variations on these themes as well as simple salads, chili with onions and cheese and a soup of the day.

The format is a cross between fast food and full service, because guests place orders at a cash register and retrieve their food on trays. The cooking is done to order, however, and the place also offers full bar service; the selection of beers includes quite a number of lesser-known foreign labels.

The expenditure of an extra 70 cents will allow one to elaborate the basic $4.25 hamburger into the extravagantly all-American bacon cheeseburger, a recherche combination that goes down quite easily. Johnny Brown’s uses a good grade of beef, cooks it up juicy and sandwiches it inside toasted buns of some quality; the garnish includes a heap of freshly made french fries and the usual onion, lettuce and tomato. It’s basic, but it’s good.

A Good Grill Man

The same comment can be made about the grilled chicken breast, which also can be had smothered with cheese and slid inside a bun. The mesquite grilling gives the meat a good flavor, and the grill man seems to know the exact moment at which the meat is at its juicy best.

The Gaslamp Quarter’s new 515 Fifth, which offers a relatively elaborate style of cooking, fits comfortably into the medium-price category when guests approach lunch as a bowl of soup paired with an appetizer, because most of these tend to be substantial. Given that meals include baskets of the excellent home-baked bread, it is possible to leave this restaurant full and happy for less than $10 per person.

The standing menu offers five appetizers and “small plates,” as it likes to call them, and this list is supplemented by three or four daily specials. Regular features include a “panache,” or delicate arrangement, of smoked salmon and Scandinavian-style dill-cured salmon, decorated with golden caviar and grilled focaccia bread; eggplant cannelloni, or sheets of eggplant wrapped around a shrimp and salmon mousse, and a salad of romaine and radicchio decorated with scallops of chicken, strips of prosciutto and rounds of creamy goat cheese.

Clever Corn Chowder

The soup recently was a clever corn chowder that followed the genuine chowder format: The corn was added sparingly, and the creamy broth included cubed potatoes, snippets of Ortega chilies, sliced mushrooms and celery. It was a remarkably elegant soup, with the caveat that it seemed to include not a speck of salt; those multitudes who restrict their sodium intake would not have been disappointed by this, but the soup was flat.

A sauce that seemed much like the soup (it was a touch thicker, and included salt and a more generous supply of corn) dressed a beautifully arranged plate of Anaheim chili peppers stuffed with tiny, sweet rock shrimp. Cilantro brought a decided perkiness to the plate, which was reasonably filling and seemed fairly priced at $5. Other special appetizer choices that day were country-style rabbit pate with a salad of tomato and red onion, and broiled Kunamoto oysters, arranged over a watercress salad and topped with smoked salmon and golden caviar.

The kitchen put one of those usually unlovable calamari steaks to good use by coating it with sesame seeds, giving it a quick saute in hot butter and arranging the sliced result over a handsome salad of fine pasta, enoki mushrooms, Belgian endive, snow peas and shredded red bell pepper. This was of course colorful, but, much more important, it offered an unusual and quite satisfying combination of flavors. This extravagant presentation cost $5.75.

Indulgence in the pastry tray may lift this place beyond the realm of an everyday-price lunch, but the six or seven choices are quite difficult to resist. Recent winners among the homemade beauties were a pistachio-strawberry tart (possibly the only one of its kind in the county) and a light cheesecake sweetened with honey and flavored with fresh blueberries.

Joseph’s, 740 Broadway, 239-0112.

Downtown Johnny Brown’s, Community Concourse (1220 3rd Ave.), 232-8414.

515 Fifth, 515 5th Ave., 232-3352.