City Lights Cafe - a Downtown Sylva Treat

After an incredibly busy morning it was time to meet our clients at City Lights Cafe in Sylva for lunch.  What a welcome treat it was and a grand chance to relax.  While the restaurant has been there for a while, it's gone through a couple of names and owners.  This newest incarnation is the best!  The new owner, Bernadette, has so much to be proud of.  She has created the perfect kind of menu.  You know the kind, everything is so tempting that its difficult to make a quick decision.  Maybe that was her plan.  The complete antithesis to "fast food".  A grand opportunity to fully appreciate what you are about to eat.  A very intentional experience.

The food was fantastic, Leslie and I each had different crepes and Nelson and Jeannette had scrumptious looking grilled pannini sandwiches.  Our plates were garnished with a wedge of sweet and juicy watermelon.  If that wasn't enough, Nelson ordered a slice of carrot cake that was just exquisite...and huge!  We split it four ways and all had an opportunity to enjoy dessert.  The slice was beautiful, with actual shreds of carrot.  Food shouldn't always be the result of talking into a speaker and reaching through a drive through window.  It should be about feeding all of the senses and that is exactly what we had today.

City Lights Cafe is in a great location, just off Main Street right here in downtown Sylva and...get this...attached to a great independently owned bookstore called City Lights also.  Bernadette did everything right.  She updated the windows so that she could improve the energy efficiency of the building and added air conditioning.  We had stopped going to the earlier lives of this restaurant space because it was jsut too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter.  Now it's perfectly comfortable.  There's also seating on the covered front porch and around the side in the veranda area.  City Lights Cafe is very bistro, very local, and a very good addition to Sylva.  I can't wait to go back!