There comes a time when you just can't look at another sandwich and when drinking from anything with a ringpull top seems too damn uncivilised for words. For a long time now, we have been a nation of lunch-on-the-run merchants, disinclined to eat in restaurants at lunch time because it takes too long and it's just too heavy.
Enter the sandwich bar and witness the gradual decline of the flabby, white, ham sangwich and the rise and rise of the Canadian home-cured ham with semi-sundried tomato on rye. All well and good, but when you're eating at your desk or grabbing a speedy lunch in a cafe every day, it becomes a little difficult to ring the changes.
But pastrami be praised, two new cafes in Dublin's city centre are now offering city-dwellers the chance to chose a freshly-squeezed juice smoothie, pick up a Thai chicken-filled wrap and a coffee, and head back with them to the office in double-quick time. And, like some kind of nutrition vigilantes, these places are managing to sneak a whole pile of vitamins and proteins into us without us even noticing.
The Joose Bar is a bright splash of orange on Poolbeg Street - a street better known for the oldschool bar, Mulligan's, than for culinary revolution. It's owners, Melanie Mercer and Emer Fitzpatrick, are friends since their UCG days and are both business graduates who gave up very different careers to open the cafe.
"We'd talked about opening up our own business for years," says Melanie. "We both wanted to work for ourselves rather than other people." In her previous life, Melanie applied for EU funding for fisheries across Europe while Emer was a computer consultant. The deciding factor in their decision to open the Joose Bar came when Emer, who had been working in London, came home to install a computer system in the GPO.
"There was nowhere to have lunch," she points out. "Nowhere where you could get fresh fruit or salads or juices, so we saw there was an opening there." Ideas for The Joose Bar came from a cafe Melanie had worked in while backpacking around Australia and from juice bars in the US and London, while the glass blocks and pale wood of the cafe were spotted by Emer on a holiday in Sweden.
Once they had decided to open the cafe - and after they'd been accepted onto the DIT's Enterprise Support programme - they went to the US to see what the new trends were and to source the juicing machines. These wonders now turn, rotate, grind, squash and pulp like a series of Heath Robinson contraptions behind the counter in Poolbeg Street.
In a way they provide a key to the success of the new cafe. With whizzy names like The NutriFaster and the FMC, they speed up the juicing and mean that apples, kiwis and carrots can be chucked in whole and turned into juice in seconds. Blenders have special sound-proof hoods, developed after customers in the US complained that eating in a juice bar was a little like eating in a dentist's waiting room.
"They're called theatre-style machines in the States," offers Emer, and you can see why as every detail of your cup of juice is performed, rather than prepared, in front of you.
The menu is full of things like The Blend (a smoothie made of blueberry, orange juice, banana and a little low-fat frozen yoghurt) or The Hair of the Dog (pink grapefruit, lemon, lime and orange juice), which is particularly popular with men apparently. A chill cabinet to one side offers salad bowls, Greek salad or chicken wraps, and ciabatta sandwiches stuffed with things like tuna, red peppers and scallions made up on-site every morning. They open at 7 a.m., offering juices, fruit salads and muesli to red-eyed execs.
"We're providing a real alternative to fast food. You may have to eat in the office and eat quickly but we're doing the kind of things that people eat at home," points out Emer. "People are starting to know that they have to look after themselves and here they can get all their daily vitamins in a glass. It's clean, fresh and they can see it being made." "And lets face it," adds Melanie, "It's easier than going to the gym". Over at Nude Food on Suffolk Street they also aim to make eating well a lot easier than going to the gym. The proprietors, Norman Hewson and David Quirke, are like evangelists extolling the virtues of a new way of life and, to be fair, there is much about Nude that is innovative and different. Although the line-up of servers waiting to take your order may remind you of McDonalds, the cutlery is made of light disposable wood and the juices come in oldfashioned glass milk bottles that can be cleaned and re-used.
Then there's the food and the juices - not a burger or cola in sight, only juices and smoothies with names like Berry Burst or Mango Passion. If all that fresh fruit isn't enough for you, you could always order an add-in too - Siberian ginseng, echinacea, ginko biloba and vitamin C complex. If you look hard enough you could probably find "inner peace" or "a clear conscience" somewhere on the list too.
There's a cabinet full of wraps stuffed with hummus, spinach and peppers or blackened salmon, stacks of caesar or mozzarella salads and waters and juices complete with the funky Nude label. In the gleaming chrome kitchen there are navy and denim-clad chefs at work preparing the six soups on offer daily as well as the selection of hot wraps (chicken tikka or, get this, bacon and cabbage) and panini which are made to order. The idea first came to David Quirke, who has been the ideas man behind over 37 pubs and nightclubs across Europe, on a trip to the US. "I saw these juice bars in LA and they were so LA - they had juices to lift bags under your eyes and everything, but they tasted great. Then in a stopover in Minneapolis, I ate at a great place offering only wraps and then back in New York, there's all these soup places like Soup Nazi and Daily Soup. The three concepts came together in Nude because it gets over the seasonal factor - in summer juices will be more popular, in winter the soups."
THE pair, together with food consultant Freda Wolfe who planned the menu, were anxious to use as much organic or free-range food as possible. "It's what you could call `faster food'," says David. "Not in terms of delivery times but because this kind of food gives you more energy. You get out of your body what you put into it."
Still, his partner Norman Hewson, the man behind Tosca restaurant next door and a brother of Bono, is anxious to steer well away from what he calls "the brown rice and sandals brigade". "If a product is on the menu it's there because it tastes good, not because it's good for you." The prices at Nude are higher than your local sandwich shop, Norman is unapologetic.
"The prices are a little higher because quality raw materials cost more. As a business we're taking a bit of that hit and we would expect our customers to take a little too. It's worth it for good food." The emphasis is not just on the food either. The background music is constantly changing, thanks to a DJ hired to make new minidiscs each day, and there is an airy seating area planned by Irish-born designer Paul Daly. Known for his work with the Elbow Room chain of bars in England, Paul has used antique Czech oak on the walls and combined it with lots of steel and concrete - "somebody said that it's like McDonalds meets Aquarius, I don't know what to make of that" muses David.
The pair, who are backed by a number of investors, reckon they would have been out of business within a year if they had opened even five years ago. "Not a chance we'd have survived. Places like Wagamamma have opened up and refined people's palates - Chinese used to be exotic and then we got sick of it and suddenly Thai was an option and so on," points out Quirke. "This is the future. There's so much scaremongering that if we become a place that is trusted people will just keep coming back to us." "Besides," adds Norman succinctly. "It tastes good."