Eat

Why: Oxford is filled with hordes of excellent establishments for grabbing lunchtime ciabatta sustenance, but surprisingly lacking in places to actually sit down and enjoy your munch. You can find any combination of continental-style olive-mozzarella-paninis, but the essential continental ingredient, somewhere to settle and watch the world go by, book in hand, is elusive. Georgina’s is not ‘continental’ in the moustache-stroking, smoky joie-de-vivre sense, but it has that individual student-with-no-timetable feel to it and, unlike at Blackwell’s Nero you are unlikely to bump into your tutor. The entrance’s precipitous staircase, neon paintings of can-can girls and occasional wafts of Bob dylan, combined with the provided reading material of Heat and Hello perhaps put the dons off, but unsurprisingly make it a popular nest for us. Hidden upstairs in the Covered Market it also eludes the tourists, which given its miniscule size is a blessing. This is not somewhere to work at the weekend, when it is heaving. On a drab afternoon however, it is perfect for a quiet late lunch when working in the libraries is sending you to sleep. It is also, disregarding the paving works, one of the closest places to the Bodleian for a coffee, and every day, as if to prove this point, there is always a gentleman reading on the far table.What to eat: GEORGINA’S77 The Covered Market Av 301865 2495278am-5pmLunch £5The flower-festooned menu is chatty and proudly presents its paninis as better than other ‘big ole greasy lunches you can buy in this darn city.’ despite this uncharacteristic southern American twang, the paninis are not Georgina’s ‘piece de resistance,’ being adequate but somewhat expensive in comparison to other places. More worthy of the chat are the flour tortilla wraps, which are huge and come with cheese, jalapeños, salad, sour cream and salsa. The food arrives on circular wooden chopping-board-esqe ‘platters’, which can only be described as hearty. This, I think, is the key word for the best Georgina specialities; the homemade soup served with a genuine ‘hunk’ of fabulous brown bread, and the enormous salads which sound Greek but somehow don’t quite have that feel. There are other salads to pick and mix from, either as a plate on their own or to accompany other wholesome sounding mains such as nachos or spicy spud skins. To follow up there is a limited selection of flapjack and shortbread rectangles, and the chocolate caramel slice I tried was overwhelmingly sweet. Still, for an afternoon’s work, the generous mugs of tea for 95p and the toasted bagels or bread and jam make this place with its ambience more than appealing.ARCHIVE: 5th week MT 2005