Magan Pilato stands behind the counter at Lunch, her sandwich shop at the intersection of Church and State streets, chatting up a customer as she rings up his order. She seems to know him pretty well. She knows the customer behind him by name, and suggests what he might want for lunch. The woman behind him also seems like a familiar face - Pilato asks about her kids. By the time I'm finished with a gooey grilled chicken-breast panini and a side of pasta salad, Magan Pilato knows me pretty well, too.

The kindhearted and apparently omniscient waitress is a stock figure in American entertainment: Flo and Alice working the counter at Mel's Diner, Darlene dishing up gossip and tuna hotdish at the Chatterbox Cafe in Lake Wobegon. Pilato, who not only runs the counter at Lunch, but also cooks and manages the business, reinterprets the role of kindly waitress for the 21st century. And she makes a pretty darn good sandwich, too.

Open for only seven months (not quite a record for this apparently fiscally cursed address, but close), Lunch delivers on its name. It does not aspire to be Lutece. It offers what Pilato described to me as "healthy food - organic and local as much as possible - at reasonable prices. Food that won't leave you dragging for the rest of your afternoon at work."

Lunch has a compact menu of sandwiches, paninis, some salads, and soups, most of which Pilato makes herself in the restaurant's small but serviceable open kitchen. She runs a few specials, and the soups rotate a bit - recently there has been corn chowder, cream of mushroom, and chicken noodle among others - but what Lunch really offers is reliability. You know what you are going to get from one day to the next. Once you've been going there for a few days, you might not even look at the menu. Or, then again, Pilato might know what you need and suggest it to you. Lunch is that kind of place.

During my second meal at Lunch, on one of the few truly blustery afternoons we've had this winter, I sat at the counter near the front window. I was huddled over my bowl of corn chowder, warming my hands and watching the snow fall, when Pilato came over to check on me. Something in her expression made me wonder if she was about to tousle my hair. As I recall, when I was done, she did remind me to bundle up before I headed out the door.

If that was all that Lunch had going for it, I'd probably still go back on a regular basis. But Pilato's simple sandwiches, made with bread brought in daily from Baker Street Bakery on Park Avenue, and filled with fresh ingredients (Pilato even roasts her own red peppers because she's not fond of the jarred variety) are a welcome change from the usual lockstep sandwich-chips-drink lines that shuffle in and out of local sub shops every day.

Take the Rio Monte panini ($7.49), for instance. First of all, it's a true panini: the bread squashed flat, the fresh mozzarella inside gooey and delicious. Second, the chicken tastes like chicken. Sure, she's using chicken breasts that are notoriously bland, but if she's not using organic chickens she's certainly faking it well. The grilled breast on my sandwich was fat and moist, with the particular flavor that you only get from a happy bird. The roasted red pepper, meticulously stripped of any blackened skin, was portioned very generously, and surprisingly the tomato was red rather than the pallid pink you usually see on sandwich-shop sandwiches. The basil mayo was a nice touch. There wasn't anything particularly exciting about the sandwich, but the way it was served made it clear that a lot of love for her customers went into it. Kind of like a sandwich your mom might have made you when you were a kid.

Pilato's soups, too, have that homey savor to them (all soups, $3.25). The corn chowder I had on one visit was stick-to-your ribs thick, built on a rich stock, pureed, and then enriched with kernels of summery-tasting corn, carrots, and perhaps a tiny bit of bacon. It was just the thing for a cold day. Her chicken soup, while not quite up to the standard of my mother-in-law's (that's a very high bar to clear, let me tell you) was still excellent, good for chasing off even the most belligerent and determined of viruses.

Not everything works at Lunch, though. Her "Lunch" BLT ($6.95) starts off promisingly enough with a generous layer of thick-cut, crispy bacon, mahogany hued and crunchy. As I mentioned, Pilato finds good tomatoes, which are essential to a BLT. The lettuce is lettuce. But then she starts tinkering with a good thing. A few slices of avocado aren't a bad idea. They aren't traditional, but avocado, bacon, lettuce, and tomato work well in a Cobb salad, so why not here? And then she puts goat cheese on it. I like goat cheese, I really do, but adding it to a BLT is like kissing through a thick blanket. You know something good is happening, but you can't make out the details. All of the ingredients are still there, but the cheese reduces them to elemental units rather than allowing them to blend which is what happens in a good BLT.

Fortunately, the BLT was the only misstep in my meals at Lunch, and Pilato's homemade brownies ($1 each) go a long way toward making up for any shortcomings. Thick and fudgy with a sugary crust on top of a batter that hovers on the line between cake and pudding, each generously cut square cries out for a glass of milk and the time to savor it. Unfortunately, you can only visit Lunch at its namesake mealtime when most of us don't have the time to linger. Get a couple to go and stretch Lunch into a late-night snack.

To find Lunch in City Newspaper's online Restaurant Guide - including a map, user reviews, and more - click here.

Lunch

89 State St.

(585) 325-5453, lunchrochester.com

Monday-Friday 11 a.m.-3 p.m.