Bandol
508 Second Ave, 447-0222

Mon-Fri 11 am-3 pm; bar menu 3-7 pm.

Bakeman’s Restaurant
122 Cherry St, 622-3375

Mon-Fri 10 am-3 pm.

It’s quite a trick for a restaurant to be open only for lunch. In a slim couple of hours you have to feed a whole day’s worth of customers–and usually, you don’t have the benefit of bumping up the tab with an extra bottle of wine, or a dessert. You’ve got to know your crowd, and know what kind of lunch they want. After all, there are lunches that are done and there are lunches that are grabbed. Near Pioneer Square, where the big office towers grow, you can get both.

Bandol, the new downtown sibling to Capitol Hill’s French bistro, Cassis, is open–for now at least–just for lunch and happy hour. On the ground floor of the Smith Tower, Bandol has the requisite Frenchy bistro details, such as a zinc bar and tiled floors, but glossy wood paneling and original metal scrollwork from the building also give the space an old-school American whiff of deal-making. Even the menus, tucked into mercury-toned presentation folders, cue you for a business lunch–I half expected a PowerPoint slideshow on the specials. Still, if you work downtown, it’s nice to know your waiter will hurry up lunch if need be and that, if you don’t have time to sit down, there are takeaway baguette sandwiches in a case near the door.

One thing about Bandol: You will never go hungry there, because there are always frites on the table. Beautiful wisp-thin shoestring fries, piled as high as your nose. They come with the hanger steak, they come with the liver, they come with the tart du jour, and, if you like, they come as a side, with bacon. If something misfires, say your duck confit/Brussels sprout tart ($8) is tough and has a funny, incongruous Chinese-food taste to it, well, there are frites to nibble on.

Bandol has a likable fondness for old-fashioned flavors: pan-fried veal liver ($13), Brussels sprouts ($5), and beef stew–the kind of food your grandmother might press on you, especially if she’s French. A tasty pork pâté ($7), a prerequisite in a place like this, has a jolly hard-cooked egg in it. Provençal-style fish soup ($14) is full of fennel and saffron–bright and clean, but perhaps a little afraid to taste like seafood. And at these prices, I get frustrated with untended details: unpeeled onions in the coq au vin ($14), the unpleasant pucker of underripe persimmons in a sorbet ($5), or a stringy, over-thymed brandade ($6).

I hope Bandol finds the business lunchers it’s looking for–on my two visits, the sparse clientele looked like curious eaters, like me, and not like deal brokers. But the place is still young. I’ll check back on a Friday, which is both payday and cassoulet day on the restaurant’s rotating specials menu.

At Bakeman’s there’s a totally different kind of power eating at hand: the kind done by people who have to get back to work. As soon as you turn the corner in the basement cafeteria, you’re expected to order. The pace is pervasive; when I walked in the other day, even an elderly couple eating their lunch out in the dining area looked up with eyes that seemed to ask, “What’ll it be?” I wasn’t up to the pressure. I hesitated with my order and the counterperson had already started making a second turkey sandwich by the time I blurted out, “Make one of them liverwurst, please….” As the sandwiches were wrapped, I ordered a slice of homemade apple pie. “Just one piece?” bossed another server, nodding at my two sandwiches. “What about the other person?” I promised to share the pie.

Quick service aside, Bakeman’s serves the most honest of food. Nothing is sliced thin: The turkey sandwich ($3.65) is stuffed with fat hunks of meat, both dark and white, and moistened with cranberry sauce and mayo; the liverwurst ($3) lies in slabs between layers of squashy wheat bread; and the moist house-made lemon poppy seed and chocolate cakes are sold in doublewide portions. As for my slice of pie ($2), it was filled with chunks of apple, and not gluey in the least. It’s true that I promised to share it, but then something happened and I didn’t.