As soon as you enter Panera in Clark, New Jersey you are greeted with a decently sized waiting area. After you order there are lots of places to sit and wait like booths, tables, and smaller waiting tables. Along the walls, is their actual physical menu. I just stuck to ordering with the iPads they also provide for you to order with. As you would expect, the iPad menu, physical menu, and drive-through all have the same items on them.

The Menu

Panera has a larger menu, with over a hundred menu items. They are known for their salad, soups, and sandwiches. They also have a larger bakery menu, and breakfast options until 10:30 a.m. Between soups, salads, sandwiches, breakfast, and bakery, Panera offers over 30 vegetarian options. None of the menu options seemed to be over twenty dollars, and everything on the menu seemed reasonably priced. Panera also just created over 10 new menu items, calling it a “new era.”

The Ambiance

Panera is known for its calm, warm, and welcoming environment, and that’s exactly what I got. I went more around lunchtime, it was more of a busy time to visit. Despite most of the tables being taken, there were still many different places to choose to sit, including outdoor seating. A lot of the people in there had computers and were either by themselves or with one other person. For the most part, it was very quiet in there, there was low pop music that was playing from the restaurant’s speakers.

The seating is in a different area than where you order and pick up your food, which I do appreciate. The walls in the eating area are lined with booths that can fit 2-8 people, in the middle some tables can fit any group of people. Although for the most part, it was pretty clean, the table next to where I sat had a lot of crumbs on it, and it looked dirtier than the other tables around.

The order

I got the “you pick two,” where you get to pick a cup of soup or mac and cheese, half salad or a half sandwich. I got a cup of homestyle chicken noodle soup and half a bacon turkey bravo. The homestyle chicken noodle soup has smaller squares of pieces of white-meat chicken that fall apart in your mouth, in a seasoned homestyle chicken bone broth with curly egg noodles, sliced carrots, celery, and herbs. I also had the half bacon turkey bravo, oven-roasted turkey breast, applewood-smoked bacon, smoked Gouda, mixed greens, tomatoes, signature sauce, salt, and pepper on a Tomato Basil Bread. The soup was $5.29 and the sandwich was $7.19. This is one of the only things I ever get from Panera, and I have never had a bad experience with it.