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Bon Appetit can be a bit tricky to find among the construction that always seems to being going on around the corner of Redwood and Calvert streets. But if you can look past the guys in hard hats, you'll find a quiet, pristine lunch counter that crosses cultures and offers a variety of dishes that will fill you up without emptying your pockets.

The owner is Persian, but he lived in France for several years, and Bon Appetit's menu features both French- and Middle Eastern-influenced fare. The rice niçoise salad ($4.99) is a full meal that goes beyond the usual restaurant salad curse of too few veggies on too much lettuce. Instead, it brimmed with tuna, red and green peppers, tomatoes, olives, hard-boiled egg, and corn; the house dressing, a mix of olive oil and lemon juice, was light but flavorful. The cheese sandwich with walnuts ($3.99) offered fat slabs of Brie on French bread. It's a simple concoction, but the crunch of the walnuts provided an excellent counterbalance to the creamy Brie. The bland, gloopy French onion soup ($1.99) was the only Continental disappointment.

On the Middle Eastern end of the menu, Bon Appetit offers a cucumber salad ($2.99) and a couscous tabbouleh salad ($4.99) that are neither too dry nor too soggy, and a variety of kebabs. The chicken kebab sandwich ($5.99) was huge and savory. Add a bit of the sumac available on each table for an extra kick of flavor.

E-mail Anna Ditkoff