The Deli at Alley Station and the Laws of Unintended Consequences

A municipal inspector slaps the face of a street fruit vendor in Tunisia and the next thing you know a 23-year dictatorship crumbles leading to further uprisings in the Arab world, the flight of Hosni Mubarak and the impending doom of that tragically comic figure Muammar Gaddafi, recently falsely rumored to have been shot by his own troops. Of course, in between these events Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old fruit vendor, set himself on fire.  His protagonist, Faida Hamdy, a 45-year-old daughter of a police inspector with an unblemished record, could never have guessed what she started when she slapped Bouazizi for trying to stop her from confiscating the scale he used to weigh his fruit.

What the hell does this have to do with The Deli at Alley Station? Probably nothing. But the thought occurred to me today that we have not had many meetings of the LITG gang since the Alley Deli opened and today, I believe I discovered why:  The opening of a semi-deli downtown has spawned a rash of mastergumption!(It's a word!  If you do not believe me, look in the LITG Glossary). If this rash of calling in take-out orders to eat alone at your desk continues, it could mean the end of the lunch in the gump world as we know it.

I mean, for those of us working downtown in excitement central, especially during good weather, it is just so easy to pick up the phone, dial 263-2922, order a Cuban panini, and then 10-minutes later walk to Alley Station, pay your $6.95 plus tax and walk back to the office to eat in peace while you surf the latest NY Times book reviews (or the latest Charlie Sheen exploits in classy living).  Why I, myself, have done this way too many times since the place opened in early February.  The Reuben, the Grilled Chicken Breast, the Classic Club (one of my favorites); and the Italian are just some of the sandwiches I have ordered in the last month. The Reuben, according to Tojo, is the touchstone of any good sandwich shop, and the Reuben at The Deli passed the Tojo test (even though it isn't really corned beast).  Everything we have had so far has been decent if not really good. No, this is not the Carnegi Deli, but it is a decent deli (with a small-"d") on lower Commerce across from the Big Bronner Hotel and, by the looks of the crowds you see there in the "to go" line for breakfast and lunch, the instance of mastergumption must be hitting epidemic proportions.

Of course, you can eat in the Deli with friends at a table and actually have conversations that make a true lunch experience. But the time and trouble of arranging convenient times and hassling over which place to visit and waiting for the latecomers to show all make eating alone in your office that much more appealing to someone who has just heard about enough of the exploits of that tree poisoning nut, our budget woes, Charlie Sheen, and, (now we come back to the beginning), the unrest in Libya. There, I've tied it all back together and it makes sense...sort of.  Maybe.  A nice new deli opens in February and by June we are all zombies eating lunch alone in our cubicles or something....worse?