Pictured above: Asian Pear Salad, Mango BBQ Shrimp Wrap, and Build Your Own Salad

Garden City Bistro is located on the busy strip of Franklin Ave in Garden City, NY. This cozy restaurant offers a wide variety of fresh, healthy dishes, such as wraps, salads, paninis, soups, and burgers. During the warmer months, there are a handful of sidewalk tables available, but all year round you can find tightly stacked tables inside.

On the rare days that I don’t pack lunch for work, 9 times out of 10 I am ordering lunch from Garden City Bistro. If you do plan on ordering takeout from this restaurant during peak hours, the best advice I can give you is to place your order online far in advance. If you do not follow my advice, I can guarantee that you will be waiting in a long line for about an hour or more. The same goes for delivery during peak hours. On the other hand, the one time that I visited the restaurant on a weekend, it was fairly empty.

In the past year I have become a big fan of the food at Garden City Bistro. You have the option of ordering straight off the menu or building your own salad, wrap or panini. Majority of the time I build my own salad. The salad will typically consist of blackened shrimp, avocado, mango salsa, pineapple, roasted onions, roasted mushrooms, and BBQ sauce dressing.

The pineapples add a sweet and tangy flavor to the salad, in contrast to the mango salsa bringing all the spiciness. Even though I initially thought that BBQ sauce was an unusual dressing for a salad, it actually paired well with the other flavors. It should be noted that building your salad will more than likely end up being more expensive than ordering off the menu, but it’s worth it, to me at least. I enjoy the luxury of getting exactly what I want on my salad. No substitutions. No compromises.

On the days that I’m not building my own salad, I stick to either the Mango BBQ Shrimp Wrap or the Asian Pear Salad. The wrap was absolutely delicious and filling. You get a lot of food stuffed into one wrap, so much so that food is already overflowing from the wrap before you take a bite. You never have to be concerned about not being full afterwards. The Mango BBQ Shrimp Wrap comes either in a whole wheat or plain tortilla wrap stuffed with rice, lettuce, bite sized pieces of mango, and large chunks of shrimp.

Garden City Bistro is a great restaurant to grab a quick bite on the go, get takeout or delivery for lunch, or to enjoy a healthy meal on the weekend. They offer vegetarian options, and if you build your own salad/wrap/panini you can make it vegan.

Watch a quick video about Garden City Bistro here: