2100 Bar and Bistro (Marriot Hotel)

I was recently at the Marriot Hotel on the waterfront for a business lunch of sorts. I was initially excited to have a fancy lunch on somebody else's dime, but was totally disappointed when I got a look at the menu.

There were four vegetarian choices:

1. Grilled cheese sandwich
2. Oven fired cheese "flatbread"
3. Butter lettuce salad with goat cheese croutons
4. Tomato soup

These options might sound like fun little meat-free interludes to an omnivore looking to vary it up, but for a vegetarian, the cheese+bread option can be tiring and incomplete.

I ordered half a grilled cheese with the house salad. What came was an expensive joke in proportion... a tiny sandwich and a pile of full-size butter lettuce leaves with sliced red onion. Sandwich was delicious, but with enough butter and good cheese and fresh bread it's not hard to make a tasty grilled cheese. Salad was nice too, it's hard to go wrong with butter lettuce, but I would have appreciated it if somebody in the back could have cut it into manageable size before it hit the table. I felt like a tool cutting my salad with a knife and fork like it was a piece of flimsy watery steak.

But the main problem was the tiny quantity. One of my dining companions ordered a Cesar salad, and when she too was done screeching her knife across her meager plate of full-size Romain leaves we nearly crashed knuckles reaching desperately for the last bread in the bread basket.

This place isn't worth the money for a vegetarian.