Lunch At Midtown’s First Birdbath Bakery Is Going To Cost You

When you walk into a place where baked goods and bespoke chocolate bars are displayed on a table, and there’s no menu board on display, it’s always a little suspicious, price-wise. Such is the case of the new Birdbath Bakery -a City Bakery offshoot- that opened a branch in the 2 Grand Central Tower atrium on 45th St. (btw. 3rd & Lex). I’ve eaten at the location in Tribeca a few times during my tenure as head Downtown Lunch’er and found the food mostly tasty, but with a high price tag that was hard to swallow.

I checked out a sandwich for you Midtown Lunch’ers, and you can hear the good and the bad of it straight ahead. 

The menu has  a good selection of both vegetarian and meat-bearing sandwiches, ranging in price from $6.50 to $9.50. I’m happy to say that they do carry the standout veggie burger in m’smen that offers perhaps the greatest fullness-to-price ratio at Birdbath. In addition to sandwiches, there are a few prepared sides, soups and “snack pizzas,” or you can get one of their many baked goods (pretzel croissants! huge cookies!). Oh, and there’s the famous City Bakery hot chocolate, too.

Let’s discuss the sandwich I spoke of. I went with a model containing fennel salame, asiago and broccoli rabe pressed between two pieces of multigrain bread. You may or may not be interested to know that the cheese was from NY state. This set me back $9.25.

The good news: this was a tasty sandwich and they did not skimp on the asiago. There was more cheese than meat in here, but all of the ingredients were really tasty and high-quality. The bad news is it wasn’t the largest of sandwiches and I paid $10 for it. Also, what’s up with the whole leaf of lettuce placed in the box along with the sandwich? What am I going to do with that?

I would recommend Birdbath for breakfast or a mid-afternoon cookie, but you’re probably going to feel a little bit ripped off in the sandwich department.

Birdbath Neighborhood Green Bakery, 140 E. 45th St. (btw. 3rd & Lex), (212) 257-6434

7 Comments

  • FREAK OF THE WEEK

  • Believe the lettuce leaf was dropped in as a courtesy, to give to Sarah, to wipe after her amoebic dysentery

    Cause Midtown Lunchers got each others’ back(sides)

  • “City Bakery” — ’nuff said. Overpriced or, as accurately stated above, “you’re probably going to feel a little bit ripped off.”

    Are there really no more true Midtown Lunches? Filling, decent-tasting value lunches for under $10? Haven’t seen any on this site in a long time, and that makes me sad. (Haven’t seen the ML Forums in a long time either, and that makes me sadder. How do millions of other websites around the planet set up spam-free discussion forums????)

    These are the reasons why midtownlunch.com is dying, and that makes me REALLY sad!

  • Just read today’s post for My Belly’s Playlist, but comments a re closed for that (why?) so I’ll comment here.

    “The majority of the sandwiches on the MBP menu are over the ML limit, not by much, with the most expensive option being $14.” Really. In fact, the 2 cheapest sandwiches on their menu are exactly $10, pre-tax: grilled cheese and squash. Really?

    ML is truly dead. Staff isn’t even trying to find Midtown Lunches anymore.

  • It may cost something, but the food here is great. I had a chicken sandwich and a chocolate chunk cookie. The sandwich was heavily buttered which improved the taste, but hurt the calorie count.

    The cookie was a perfect combination of crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. Birdbath is basically a high end Panera.

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