Lunch gets no respect. The lobby for Big Breakfast has conned us sheeple into believing it’s the most important meal of the day. Dinner is spent with the people we love most. Lunch is an annoyance, something to demolish over your keyboard. And that’s a shame, because lunch is the weirdest meal of the day. We eat lunch with coworkers we don’t like; we eat lunch with strangers. We discuss new projects and have affairs over lunch. Why waste that time with something you scrounged in a Starbucks, wrapped in plastic like a corpse?
Out on the edge of Pioneer Square, Bakeman’s (122 Cherry St, 622-3375) has been chugging along since 1970, and it’s the lunch-counteriest lunch counter you’ve ever seen. If City Hall, as many city employees inform us, is a glorified high school, Bakeman’s is its school cafeteria, with industrial trays, a wall of bottled drinks, and absolutely no frills. The people who plan the city’s future meet here to throw printouts of spreadsheets around a table and pretend they’re really excited about preparing the slides for the next ideation meeting…