Dining out: Pirate O's Deli features gourmet sandwiches

Published: Thursday, June 11, 2009 6:57 p.m. MDT
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DRAPER — I'm always looking for a chance to visit Pirate O's, a funky, totally unpretentious gourmet food store in Draper — though I do have to consciously limit my visits to one every couple of months, since I always end up spending about five times more than I intended.

But now that Pirate O's has opened a deli featuring sandwiches made with many of its best products, I may find myself visiting more often.

These are good, imaginative sandwiches, as my friend Brenda and I discovered when we had lunch there on a recent weekday.

The restaurant is carved out of a corner of the store near the cash registers, with a simple deli case, a few tables and smiling servers wearing pirate head wraps showing customers they're in the right place.

The menu isn't long — several grilled sandwiches on ciabatta and several cold sandwiches — but it's still hard to choose when words such as "lingonberries," "fresh mozzarella" and "raspberry honey mustard" are jumping out at you.

Each sandwich comes with a bag of crunchy kettle chips. Customers can choose from the nearby cases of drinks — everything from European bottled water and Orangina to Stewart's Key Lime and Orange Crush — or, if one case of drinks seems too limiting, they can stroll over to the store's cold room for shelf upon shelf of exotic bottled drinks.

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Brenda had the grilled turkey sandwich with havarti cheese and lingonberries. I liked this sandwich's thoughtful combination of fruit and cheese from the same part of the world — they work beautifully together, creamy and acidic, sweet and salty.

My son had the roast-beef panini welded together with provolone and topped with thin-sliced white onions, cucumbers and snappy chipotle mayonnaise — on sale, incidentally, on a shelf nearby.

Of course, since he's 3 years old, there was plenty of sandwich left for my daughters to devour as an after-school snack.

I had a cold sandwich, the turkey and Swiss on a fresh, crackly Vosen's baguette with red onion, lettuce, cream cheese and fabulous ancho-chile jam, which I intend to buy in large quantities as soon as I go back.

It's sweet, chunky and just a little spicy.

I'm conflicted about sandwiches on baguettes, because the firm bread often means the contents get squeezed out as I eat. But in this case, I put up with it, because the robust fillings seemed to demand robust bread.

There's no dessert at the deli counter, so if I were you, I'd do what we did: Wander the aisles until one of the many sweets from around the world catches your eye.

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