Olio's cart

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a gathering of RVA food bloggers at Olio's which was a rather interesting event in and of itself. Olio and the event has been blogged about (among other places) here, here and here.
Olio (formerly European Market, the menu and the environs dont appear to have changed significantly since this earlier incarnation) has been a good and cheap visit for some time now. They make good use of cheese and vegetables (which I like) and have some really good deals on beer as well. I must confess that everytime I've been there, I've sort of wished they made it a bit more "comfortable" and welcoming as a place to dawdle but I digress....one of the revelations from this event was the fact that Olio has a food cart in the VCU area! A couple of false starts later (they need some sort of real time feed like their neighbor Nate's Taco Truck ideally with position and menu for lazy people like myself), I finally got to try them. I am glad that we have a nice addition to the lunch options around the VCU campus. The sandwiches while a trifle greasy, were fresh and well put together. And with some limonata, were just the ideal components for an alfresco lunch.

A perfect day for some observation, we watched the lines at NTT and O. while we ate. The throughput (time to walk away w/ food - time to order) was roughly estimated: NTT has the entire process down very efficiently and generally seems to average 3:30 +/- 15 sec (it also appears that people typically order 2 tacos). O. takes a little longer at roughly 4:00 +/- 30 sec. We're obviously not considering complexity of food preparation here ! However, at a given time, NTT appeared to have 2x to 3x the number of people in the O. line, so it makes for an amusing optimization problem (if time calculations are important :)).

With sandwiches in the $6-$8 range, the Olio mobile is a wonderful alternative to the chain places* around, especially with the nice weather days coming up.

Adding to my list of good vegetarian options around campus, I finally made my way to the Harrison Street Coffee Shop and quite liked the offerings there.

* - viz Panera, Subway et al. Now, I know Subway is not exactly a point of reference but useful as a price floor (I recently had the misfortune of eating there and found that their subs - at least the kind available in the VCU Commons could be well fit to an f(cardboard) function! Oddly enough, I kind of remember them being better when I was in grad school)