Downtown Williamsburg , Virginia's Best Quick Lunch

The Cheese Shop is a small retailer of fine foods and wine in downtown Williamsburg, Virginia. At lunch time the Cheese Shop offers some truly excellent deli sandwiches to customers. The sandwiches only cost around $6, and are made with the gourmet bread and cheese which made the shop famous. With the sandwich, a variety of drinks and snacks are available. The drinks include Pepsi products on tap, high quality bottled root beer, cream soda, and ginger ale, as well as a good selection of bottled beers and wines. For snacks, chips and cookies are available, but the best snack in the store is a bag of the famous Cheese Shop bread ends. These bread ends (the heels of the loaves from which the shop makes their sandwiches) come in bags of six or eight for only $1, and make an excellent and healthy snack for travelers and sightseers. Two sandwiches, a bag of bread ends, and two drinks will cost less than $20, and will be a filling lunch for two people and offer enough left over bread to provide snacks for the rest of the day.

In the basement of the Cheese Shop is a fairly extensive and high quality wine cellar. This wine cellar offers a wide variety of wines (and is the only place in Williamsburg you can buy Mead, if you're feeling really old-fashioned), and the prices are quite reasonable. Available at the Cheese Shop's wine cellar are many local and Virginia-made wines which are difficult to find anywhere else. It is an ideal place for travelers to find gifts to take home with them. The retail part of the Cheese Shop also offers a good selection. It carries a wide variety of tea, pastas, and other imported foodstuffs and, of course, a wonderful selection of gourmet cheese.

One major drawback to the Cheese Shop is that there is essentially no indoor seating. A few barstools are available for those who wish to eat inside, but these have all been occupied whenever I've been in the Cheese Shop. The majority of the seats are located outdoors on the patio, and many patrons take their lunches with them to eat as picnics elsewhere in downtown Williamsburg. The lack of indoors seating isn't a huge problem, but there are some days in the summer when it gets hot enough that I wish I could eat my sandwich in the air conditioning.

For those with special dietary needs, the Cheese Shop can be very accommodating. Since each sandwich is made to order, vegetarians or those with dairy allergies can easily request that meat or cheese be omitted from the sandwich. Those who are intolerant to wheat or other grains may wish to eat elsewhere, since the majority of lunch items at the Cheese Shop are made on bread.

Every time I have ever been to the Cheese Shop, the staff have been very friendly and polite. The service is very quick - even at the busiest times it has never taken me more than five or ten minutes to get my order. The atmosphere in the Cheese Shop is quite nice, and the biggest drawback in this regard is that the place is sometimes uncomfortable crowded. This crowding, however, has never been so bad that it really deterred me from eating there, since generally I end up spending so little time inside the business itself.

The Cheese Shop is located in Merchants Square, on the Duke of Gloucester Street. It is less than a block from the historic part of Colonial Williamsburg, which makes the it ideally located for lunch during a day of sightseeing in Colonial Williamsburg. The Cheese Shop is not open for dinner.