I paid $4.50 for this crap

This is what I'm eating right now. And it sucks.

The Café Kona takeout menu described it as a Garden Salad -- lettuce, tomato, cucumbers, onions, with house vinaigrette. I thought, Great! This seems healthy! I'll take it!

And I assumed by "lettuce," this meant actual leaves of lettuce, which in my experience, is the standard for salads. (Hell, you can go to McDonald's and get leaves of lettuce. Gross leaves. But still leaves.)

Instead, I ended up with a box full of the thinly shredded iceberg lettuce (have I mentioned I absolutely HATE iceberg?) -- the kind you put on a deli sandwich, not use in a salad. This sad mess was surrounded by a few equally depressing sliced cucumbers (at first glance, I actually thought they were pickles), some stinky onions and the most pathetic tomatoes ever.

I cannot believe I paid almost $5 for this.

Seriously, I'm beginning to come to the conclusion that Napa sucks if you're looking for a good, inexpensive, somewhat healthy lunch. My only options seem to be (1) very nice, very expensive sit-down restaurants that I can't afford (money or time-wise), (2) fast-food joints, (3) mediocre "family dining" chains like Marie Callender's, or (4) "wine country" delis with overpriced bad food (one of these places actual gave me the worst food poisoning of my life about a year ago).

And I have tried. I've wasted my lunch breaks driving up and down Trancas looking for something decent to eat. I've taken coworkers' recommendations (sadly, this stupid Kona place was one of them). I've experimented with taco trucks and the soup stations at the supermarket. I've even sampled the veggie burger at Burger King (not bad, if you ask for no mayo -- and yes, there are actual leaves of lettuce on it).

But I'm close to giving up and resigning myself to brown-bag lunches forever. Well, at least until this place opens up.