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February 23, 2008
Wake Up LA: Panera
Cobblestone, Cheese souffle, and coffee @Panera | Photo by Lindsay William-Ross/LAist
Occasionally breakfast-time can't be a thing of luxury. Granted, it's the most important meal of the day, but it's also not something we all get to sit down for and order up a spread of tantalizing goodness, particularly if its a weekday and there are things that need to get done. Breakfast criteria then equals: Coffee, sustenance, and free wireless internet.
This is how I ended up at Panera in Studio City, laptop unfolded and my fast ready to be broken. The bakery chain, which has 73 locations in the state of California alone, caters to the carb-craving workaholic (or, as was the case in Studio City, screenwriters recently allowed to pick their pencils MacBooks up again). Bread and pastries at reasonable prices abound on the menuboard, and they offer free refills on coffee, which made this caffeine junkie's veins tingle with glee: "I can haz lotz of coffeeeee?" Ahh, yes.
Despite the fact that sitting inside Panera is akin to sitting inside an airport coffeeshop (minus the ill-placed luggage carts and unintelligible loudspeaker announcements) the baked goods are effing good. I picked out an egg and cheese souffle baked in bread (one of the few glimpses of breakfast protein on the menu) and couldn't resist something called the Cobblestone, which is basically a muffin goodie that's the best of all worlds in the category of breakfast breads; it's a little bit cinnamon roll, little bit bear claw, little bit muffin, and a whole lot of good.
The deal with the free wifi isn't as delectable as the free refills of coffee; whereas your intake of java is largely unmonitored following the initial purchase, the internet gets overburdened by all its users, and has a half hour cap during the midday rush, which means if you're, oh, let's say just for example's sake, writing several posts for a website like LAist, getting booted offline mid-post in order to get you logged in for your allotted half-hour at the stroke of 11:30 a.m. isn't exactly the most congenial thing. Then again, internetaholics who table-surf for hours on the price of a bottomless cup of coffee aren't exactly congenial, either.
Bottom line: In a pinch, Panera really fits the bill, and the food is pretty damn tasty, too. And sometimes, that's how we have to Wake Up LA!
Panera-Ventura Boulevard/Studio City
12131 Ventura Boulevard
Studio City, CA 91604
(818) 762-2226
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Great post.
They used to NOT monitor the net usage there at the Studio City location. I think I know why they started cracking down on it:
One day, pre-usage-monitoring... I saw a guy, (I'm not exaggerating here) sit at a Panera table... whip out a full size 17" monitor, hook it to his laptop (I guess the laptop screen wouldn't suffice) and start working.... I couldn't believe it.
I left for about an hour or so, then came back to see if he was still there (I was at the Kinkos working on a project). He was indeed still there.
But there was an addition to his Panera workstation.
A fucking printer. I laughed SO hard! And he was at one of the "good" tables too. A 5-top at least, had he been with humans... instead of demo-ing an Office Max floor display.
All that, on the back of a size-small cup of coffee.
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Thanks, worriedman. If I'd seen any such insanity as you described you'd bet your bottomless cup of coffee that it would have been my lead photo. People are outrageous!
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I agree with many of your observations...though I suspect I'm a much more dedicated fan of Panera. I moved out to Los Angeles in August 2006 and was shocked by the disturbing lack of good coffee shops with wifi access, particularly in the Valley. I live in Chatsworth, which is as close to Ventura County as an Angeleno can get. Thus it's simply impractical to venture that far to try to find coffee. I fancy myself a bit of a writer even when my writing is very sparse, so I especially like endless coffee and internet connectivity to provide me with something to do when I'm not writing. I always enjoyed Panera back in the midwest, where it has its roots (fact check here?), but we seemed to have way more independent coffee shops in my college town that had not yet been infected by the Starbucks plague. I suspect that my departure had something to do with the plague taking hold in my hometown just as I headed out to the sunshine and swimming pools of Southern California. I'd worked the bar for five years at a little Starbucks wannabe store that was managed horribly, and was therefore very disappointed not to find good espresso in the SFV. You cannot find it at Panera either, but at least the coffee keeps coming and the internet is free. And the souffles are the truth when it comes to breakfast items. They also have bread bowl soup that is hands and feet above Quiznos(r) disgusting soup, and a frontega chicken sandwich that makes me realize why tomatoes are here.
anyway...I was very happy when they opened a panera caddycorner from my workplace on the Northridge/Chatworth border. I've been off work recently, so I can hang out in there during the day and hog bandwidth, if I am so inclined :D
Good post.