Brown Bag

These salad’s are weak. I just ordered their Chicken Caesar Salad, dressing and chicken is flavorless and salad limp.
Know what’s good limp? Nothing.
There’s plenty of chicken, but it just brings nothing to the party.
I’d hit up the Au Bön Pain, being being so small and limited you can’t create your own salad.
Brown Bag, it’s time to start over.

The manager is very unprofessional, don’t have any respect for his customers, on drugs bad. Feel for brown bag.

This lunch spot has a great concept — order yourself via a touchscreen, pay, and pick up when it’s ready — however it is executed so poorly that I hadn’t even my finished my sandwich before I decided to log on and write a review on Unilocal.
Now, let me say I have never rated anyone below 5 stars on Unilocal — perhaps I really enjoy the restaurant and food industry and am compassionate with the servers because I used to be on the other side — but when I pay $ 10 for a NY Reuben panini I expect there to be all the ingredients. And I expect it to be hot off the panini press (heck, I’ll even take lukewarm). My sandwich was none of these things.
The rueben was missing the dressing, one of only 4 ingredients, and was so soggy the bread was sticking to the inside of the aluminum foil and falling apart in my hands. The meat was stuck in a small circle in the center of the bread so it didn’t cover the whole sandwich (although this did allow me to pull off a lot of the extra, soggy bread) and was ice cold. I ended up ditching the sandwich halfway through and eating a yogurt I had in the fridge at work. Needless to say, I will not be ordering from here again.

I come to this place only when craving a salad or pasta dish with ingredients I can’t get at the other restaurants around here. Overall for the price it isn’t THAT great. Also, whenever I come to this location my order gets messed up. Most recently today, I got a shrimp salad, watched him make it with NO shrimp and asked him if he put shrimp in it he says yes, I tell him I don’t see any in there and he says «it’s in there». of course I step to the side to check and voila, no shrimp. And I’m also missing other ingredients that I added on as well which wouldn’t be so bad if certain ingredients didn’t hike up the price. I’ll probably still continue to visit every one in a while for a quick salad or pasta for lunch but service and taste here is terrible!

First time trying this place. I browsed the menu but ended up just creating my own sandwich. I chose ciabatta bread (obvs) and roasted turkey (which as it turns out is hand carved, ftw). I added all of my own toppings/​condiments, paid for my sandwich, and left with it in less than 5 mins. Sandwich tastes delicious.
Touch screen ordering system is very convenient. Only complaint: it’s a little pricey. I got a sandwich… that’s it — $ 11. A sandwich, chips, and drink @ subway or potbelly would’ve easily been under $ 10. But, in Brown Bags defense, the sandwich is quite large. I was only able to eat half, so for two days of lunch, not bad.

I had eaten at this brown bag 8 or 9 times. The last time I went there before today was about a month ago. I got the Chicken Athena salad. I got it with no onion and the gave me it with no onion and no croutons. I found this out when I got back to work blocks away. When I ordered the same salad today I looked for the croutons and they were there. When I brought my salad back to my office it had no onions and NO CHICKEN. I decide to write a review two times was too many for me. If I do decide to go there again? I will check my food BEFORE I LEAVE to see if it’s correct :-(

Since Brown Bag came to my building I am poorer, but much better fed… and it’s worth it.
Love everything about this place — great food, their ordering system is great. People are always super nice.
If I could make something for lunch that tasted as good from home I would, but I can’t (I’ve tried), so I eat at Brown Bag. You should too!

Great place, very healthy, awesome selection of Salads. Make your own. They have quinoa on there pasta menu, which is way healthier, heartier, and more filling.
And I like the people there even more. Eat there almost every day.

Meh. I built my own salad. It was okay but not even $ 10.5 okay. I prefer Chop’t, I wish they’d build one around L’Enfant! !

They have great noodle bowls, great sandwiches and delicious soup. The staff preparing the food is kind and efficient. The women who works the cash register (maybe assistant manager) is great.
It’s better when you have looked at the menu in advance, there are a lot of combinations available.

This Brown Bag has the worst customer service in the morning. The cashiers are never at the register, making a quick cup of coffee turn into a waiting game … sometimes up to 5 – 10 minutes. I have waited it out a few times, but do not plan to go back in the morning. While the coffee is great — the customer service is a huge problem.

I don’t get it. This place suffers from the placement of the menus. You order while outside at kiosks which is cool, but you can’t see the menus well enough to have an idea what you want unless you are a regular. I ate there today and what I ordered was gross. I thought the Greek noodle dish sounded good. I added grilled steak, my biggest mistake. The guy making it seemed a bit lost. He had finished my noodles then remembered the steak so heated it in a pan by itself and added the pasta dish back to have them all the same temperature. Maybe that is how they always do it. I could barely eat it. The sauce was too thick and heavy.
It is my intention to give it another try. Next time I will try to not be as hungry. I was impatient which made menu placement and the line cook’s ability seem possibly worse than they should have. I will get close enough to the menu to know better what I am ordering. If the food was made as it should have been and the cook was not a fairly new hire, I don’t see any reason to get anything here again. Other choices are less complicated and give better value for the cost.
Before trying it today I asked a friend another time we were in the food court if she had eaten there. She said she had and she was also unimpressed. She felt it was expensive for the quality of food. The quantity in my case was too much. I would happily pay as much as I did for less but higher quality food.

Sorry, not a fan. Brown Bag is one of the newer restaurants to join the other L’Enfant Plaza eateries. It carries, soups, salads, sandwiches and noodle bowls. Before entering into the restaurant, you have to stand in a line to use a touch screen computer to place your order. Not sure about anyone else, but this can be a bit tricky, especially if it’s the first time you’ve come here or if you don’t really know the menu. Not to mention, senior citizens (or older clientele) could have a difficult time maneuvering through the ordering process. Not everyone is computer savvy. I, for one, am tired of doing all the work for these companies. I normally am forced to ring myself up at the self serve registers at the grocery store and now this. At BB someone should be there taking my order for me, so I don’t have to fumble around trying to figure out how I should order. Not to mention, this isn’t a cheap place to eat, so the fact that I have to do all the work and still pay darn near $ 10 for a salad is pretty ridiculous.
After you place your order with the computer, the computer prints out your receipt and you step around to pay for your meal. Your order number is called and you pick up your food and go. I ordered the BBQ Chicken Salad and it was pretty horrible. The chicken was extremely bland and was the furthest thing from BBQ as possible. The salad as a whole lacked the flavor I think of when I think, «BBQ Chicken!» The only bright side to this salad was the fried onion pieces that were in the salad. Those were pretty tasty. It’s almost like they gave me the wrong salad because the dressing nor the other ingredients matched up to an actual BBQ Chicken Salad. I can’t really comment on how the staff was because you really don’t interact with them. Other than the person collecting your money for your order and the person yelling your order number out, you don’t interact with the staff at all. The two stars are for how fast my order came out and the fried onions… the only two positives I can think of.
Needless to say, I won’t be back here anymore. If I do, I’ll have to try something else, but since I think the prices are too expensive for what you get, I may not even come back to try anything else. Yet another disappointing and too expensive eatery in L’Enfant Plaza.

Breakfast: You know when you try to make an omelette, and at the last second you realized you messed it up and try to make scrambled eggs out of it? That’s their definition of scrambled eggs. The Farmer’s Breakfast comes with fresh fruit, which means 3 pieces of honey dew. Nobody likes honey dew; you can barely call that fruit. And by toast they mean warm bread.
Lunch: Pretty decent, but it’s not first come first serve. Your food is prioritized by the type of meal you choose. However, you can also use that to your advantage if you see 10 people waiting on a salad, you can order pasta and skip most of them (and vice versa).

I ordered the bangkok noodles, substituting Quinoa for pasta, and the Parisian sandwich. Both were delicious. I will be going back there for lunch as soon as possible.
Cons: it is expensive. My meal was over $ 16.

Brown Bag offers soups, salads, noodles, and sandwiches. This review is just for their Bangkok noodle bowl with blackened chicken. You can choose from several flavor bases for your noodles (there’s a red curry option that I got called Bangkok, and several iterations of Greek, Cajun, Italian, etc.), as well as what actual noodles you would like (eg. quinoa, penne, rice noodles)
The Bangkok noodle bowl was the most flavorless, overpriced, and overcooked thing I’ve had in a long time. There wasn’t a speck of anything that looked remotely blackened, although it did have some chicken that tasted steamed and the sauce didn’t lend any flavor. The noodles were also overcooked and falling apart. I was half tempted to put soy sauce on the whole thing and call it a day.
PRICING
I added broccoli for $.50 and got two whole tiny florets for it. Adding chicken was an additional $ 2, so after tax I got out of there with an $ 10.40 noodle bowl that I really didn’t like.
The ordering system is nice (you use a touch screen to put in your order, grab your food, then pay as you exit) but it’s not clear if you’re supposed to pay first or grab your food first or exercise either option. Also, those counters are really high. Should I really have to reach over it to pick up my very hot take-​out container full of noodles?

Great place. So far, I’ve had the breakfast huevos wrap, the chili, the chicken & corn chowder, the Bangkok noodles, and a couple of salads.
Loved EVERYTHING except the Thai salad (the dressing doesn’t seem to have a lot of flavor, but the other salad ingredients were great together) and the Huevos wrap (the flavor of the oil seemed to overpower the ingredients inside the wrap, which I was really looking forward to — eggs, cheese, black beans, corn, bell pepper and a little lime juice). That Lime Cilantro Vinaigrette dressing is AWESOME.