Audio By Carbonatix
A great sandwich consists of great bread plus great filling (GS=GB+GF). What makes a great bread is freshness, flavor, and texture. The breads at Zooz are baked on site, right before your eyes if you arrive early enough, steam rising from a seven-grain bread as the baker sliced it into squares for our sandwiches. The loaves (regular, seven-grain, and whole wheat) are ciabattalike, though larger, with soft interiors and thin, slightly crisp crusts. Admittedly my methodology for determining whether there were really seven grains in the seven-grain bread was based unscientifically on how many I could make out visually, but it’s worth noting that I saw only two or three at most — and that’s counting caraway, which is technically a seed. The coloring of the bread also seemed rather white for multigrain, but, still, it was delicious. All three breads were, and indeed Zooz is halfway to a great sandwich.
What makes a great filling is freshness, flavor, and texture. There are 27 sandwich options on the menu, a wide selection until you notice that 16 of these contain either chicken, turkey, or smoked turkey. Chicken in particular rules the roost, the bird diced and tossed with ethnically diverse spice blends with familiar names — pesto, chipotle, Cajun, buffalo, and so on. A tandoori version boasted bright red, moistly grilled chicken cubes with roasted red and green peppers and mayonnaise-based sun-dried tomato spread — tasty, but it lacked tandoori’s traditional piquancy. Tuna salad was softly satisfying, fresh white albacore mixed in simple, sensible fashion with shredded carrots and mayo. A grilled vegetable wrap with feta cheese, eggplant, tomato, cucumber, and those omnipresent roasted peppers was likewise flavorful. Overall, however, fillings offered little in the way of crunch, zest, heat, vibrancy, or texture. Great bread paired with fair fillings, or, for that matter, great fillings with fair bread, yields only a pretty good sandwich (PGS=GB+FF or FB+GF).
Salads are of a “create your own” style, starting with a small or large clear plastic container of mixed greens ($4.95/$5.95) or romaine (inexplicably more expensive at $5.95/$6.95), with choice of four toppings from a twenty-item, supermarketlike salad bar (any additional items costing 50 cents apiece): cherry tomatoes, diced cucumbers, alfalfa sprouts, avocado, hard-boiled eggs, raw broccoli, dried fruit, nuts, and most everything else from a can, including chickpeas, kidney beans, black olives, beets, and corn (by the way, Zooz’s motto, stenciled on the Lincoln Road storefront window, is “The Healthy Choice”). They do offer a wide array of dressings, over a dozen in all, including some fat-free options. Give the salads a round of canned applause.
I decided to have the pizza delivered in order to ascertain the timeliness and effectiveness of Zooz’s service — that and the fact I could tack time saved traveling onto my afternoon snooz. If you wish to sample one of the individual pizzas, and you’re in the mood for a basic tomato and mozzarella cheese variety, your best bet would be to order a “cheese and roasted pepper” pie and remove the roasted peppers. Or order a “mozzarella, grilled chicken, and tomato” pie, and say, “Hold the grilled chicken, thank you.” Other pie toppings are “broccoli, pepper, and mushroom,” “grilled pepper, eggplant, and red onion,” and “four cheese” ($9.95), which featured a soft chewy crust laden with mozzarella, blue cheese, cheddar, and feta. It was quite a hefty pizza pie, delivered fresh and hot.
Zooz offers a minuscule selection of beer and wine, but this is more a smoothie joint in spirit, and the fruit shakes here do hit the spot. So do frozen flavored espresso drinks. There are plenty of seats both inside and out, the décor is cleanly modern, prices within reason, location prime. It all adds up to a decent sandwich shop.
