8200 Transit Rd, Williamsville NY 14221
Web: Panera Bread
Phone: 716.636.4705
Rating:
[learn more]Pros:
A chain shop specializing in lunch fare - passable to good soups, salads, and sandwiches - with relatively quick ordering, free Wi-Fi, and an emphasis on convenience.
Cons:
Some menu items highlight mediocre meat and poultry quality, despite attractive presentation, and sweet pastries can be much better looking than tasting. Sub shops do sandwiches better.
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"Pricing strikes us as a little high... we strongly prefer shops like the Great Northern Pizza Company that deliver more organic, interesting, and plentiful items for the same dollars."
In the Kappabashi district of Tokyo, Japan, there are stores that sell nothing more than plastic models of food, designed to look as good or better than the real items on offer at local restaurants. American restaurants use no such models, and perhaps have little need for them; chains such as Panera Bread entice customers daily with such attractive cornucopias of the real thing that facsimiles are unnecessary - a quick walk into any of the nearly 1,200 locations yields a display of baked goods better looking than a professional food stylist could assemble. But do the foods at Panera's increasingly ubiquitous soup, sandwich, salad and pastry shops taste as good as they look? Our impression is "no," but that hasn't stopped us from coming back anyway.
The Story: Western New York has six locations of Panera Bread, clean-looking restaurants where you place your order at a counter and pick it up on trays five or ten minutes later when it's ready. There's no table service - you serve yourself drinks, and for items such as pastries that might benefit from a little heat, you're pointed towards a microwave where you can handle the work yourself. It's a low-class, low-tech touch that counterbalances a modern accommodation found here: free Wi-Fi wireless Internet access. Whether you're coming here for breakfast - an egg sandwich or pastry with coffee or tea - or at lunchtime, when the crowds seem thickest at the location we visit on Transit in Clarence, you're bound to see someone on a computer or Wi-Fi enabled phone. Prices appear to take into account the provision of Wi-Fi, as they're a little high relative to the portions and quality of the items you get.
Highs: The single best thing about Panera Bread, in our view, is the convenience of its pick-up service at lunch - when you're in a rush, you can call in your order before arriving and be walking out the door fifteen minutes later with everything in hand. If nothing else, Panera is a reasonably well-oiled machine at churning out meals, earning the "reasonably" because we've had a few less than perfect items handed off when we've asked for anything except the basic menu item without any additions or subtractions. If you stick to the shops' scripted options, you'll be fine.
Otherwise, Panera's namesake bread is typically very good as well. Though it should be playing second fiddle to the other elements of a dish you've ordered, it typically winds up being the standout component - a sliced roll on the side of a salad has a thoroughly crispy crust and a soft, almost chewy inside that impress on texture even if not on depth of flavor. Similarly, a mediocre cup of French Onion Soup, generally served with somewhat too hard croutons and flakes of cheese melted only by the heat of the broth, is transformed into a tasty half meal when dumped into a hollowed out globe of bread and served with a bag of potato chips. Served without this edible bowl, the soup is unsatisfyingly small and imbalanced, but when the beef stock has an opportunity to soak into the flesh of the bread, it's hard to stop eating the semi-soggy resulting product.
Salads and sandwiches, too, range from passable to good. An Asian Sesame Chicken salad, predictably composed of lettuce, thin slices of chicken, crispy noodles, almonds and bits of Mandarin orange, would be forgettable but for a sweet, light citrus dressing that - like most Panera salads - comes in two small containers to help you measure your intake. Other salads, including a Grilled Chicken Caesar and a Strawberry Poppyseed, the latter with strawberries, blueberries, oranges, pecans and lettuce, are fine but not fantastic. Sandwiches such as the Mediterranean Veggie, a lettuce, tomato, and onion mix spiced up with hummus, cucumber, peppers and feta cheese, often arrive on the skimpy side internally and need to be bulked up by ordering with extras; however, they can taste good enough to order again.
Lows: Some sandwiches, such as the Asiago Roast Beef, highlight the mediocre quality of the meats and poultry served here - perhaps because they're designed to be mass-assembled at lunch time, all of the ingredients have the size, shape, and taste of machine-sliced, pre-prepared fare. Sub shops, even in chains such as Subway or Quizno's, do a better job of producing meats, cheeses, and vegetables that look and taste as if they're farm or market fresh, and that's saying something.
The biggest disappointment at Panera is the taste of pastries such as the Pecan Roll, which look stunning in the shop's displays and then taste utterly bland - often burnt - when served. What appeals to the eye sometimes doesn't resonate with the tongue, and the brown, caramelized glaze of sugar and cinnamon can easily remain pretty while tasting overdone.
The Verdict: Though we do eat at Panera Bread from time to time, we've found photographing the offerings to be more satisfying than consuming them. Pricing strikes us as a little high for the quantity and quality of food served, and for salads, we strongly prefer shops like the Great Northern Pizza Company that deliver more organic, interesting, and plentiful items for the same dollars. That said, if you're a big fan of breads and willing to accept the carbs they entail, you'll be pleased by the stomach padding they offer here as sides or as major components of the items you order; similarly, if you're in the need of a place to work and eat at the same time, Panera's free Wi-Fi is a nice draw that makes up a little for the omissions in its meals.
