The Holy Trinity of Theater Food

There are only seventeen days left until the end of summer theater, but I’ve finally figured out the three ideal restaurants for when one is working at the theater. The balanced combination of these three eateries will cheaply and tastily see me through to the end of the summer.

Grendel’s Den

With their $4 Express Lunch (it has so many different options! And they change every day!) Grendel’s has firmly worked its way into my heart. Their similarly cheap half-price hours from 5-7:30 every night (the entire menu is half off with a three dollar beverage tab) make me jump for joy. The past three nights I’ve eaten dinner there (shrimp and a baked potato), and tonight will make it four. When I can eat really good food for under five dollars, and have sit-down service, too, well, that just makes me happy. All this, and it’s directly on the way home from the theater—I don’t even have to go out of my way.

Veggie Planet

I discovered Veggie Planet in February of my sophomore year when I was arranging food for the Northeast Climate Conference. They gave us free pizza (we were environmentalists—they liked that) and it was hands-down the most popular thing we served. If you had told my mother when I was twelve that I would grow up to love a restaurant called Veggie Planet, she would have smiled at you and said, “What? Are you crazy?” But now, at twenty-one, I love their vegetarian pizza. With a less extensive menu than Grendel’s, it lives at spot number two: it’s where I go when Grendel’s has gotten monotonous. A plus: Veggie Planet always has really nifty art, and doubles as a folk music club.

Darwin’s, Limited

If you threw a rock off the roof of the theater, chances are, you’d be able to hit Darwin’s. During the school year, it would not be a bad estimate to assume that fully half of their revenue comes from hungry Harvard theater people. Their food is even designed for us: huge, delicious sandwiches cut in two so that if you buy one for lunch you don’t have to leave the theater for dinner. Darwin’s is where we go to get out of the theater for a while; by now, they’re used to seeing us in our paint-covered clothes.