The students of Mendo High School are blessed to have a surrounding town that is easy access to them during the lunch period. Although Mendocino is a tourist town and many of the food choices are expensive, there are less expensive meal options there if you take the time to look for them. For this article I will be guiding you to the best places to eat lunch for only five dollars a day. Lunches in this article will be either just the food, or a meal with the addition of a drink if there’s money left over. All products will be bought from one store, restaurant, or cafe each meal.

First I went to the Garden Bakery, a very popular destination for Mendo high school students. The Garden Bakery offers tamales, with either carnitas, chicken, or asada. My favorite kind is the carnitas, but my decision to go with the chicken tamale was based on the observation that chicken is the most popular choice for high school students eating at the Garden during lunch. On this day I bought a chicken tamale for only three dollars and with the remaining two dollars a lemon San Pellegrino. The tamale was very good; there is just the right amount of chicken inside to match the masa, and the San Pellegrino washed it down nicely. Along with the different flavor San Pellegrinos that the Garden offers, there are also cans of Coca-cola and Sprite for sale. In the hot drink section, the hot tanks of  Thanksgiving coffee stand alone. Altogether the Garden is a great place to stop by for a healthy, hearty lunch under five dollars. On a scale from 1-10 the Garden chicken tamale is an 8. I gave it this score because of the delicious meal for very cheap.

My next stop was Harvest Market at Mendosa’s where I picked up a half a pint of lasagna soup for $3.49 and a telera roll for 50 cents. This left me with a single dollar and penny, a little more than the amount for an Arizona Green Tea with Ginseng and Honey, my top choice . Out of the various array of soups that Mendosa’s offers, lasagna is my favourite, closely followed by the corn chowder. The most popular soup there is the clam chowder, but I personally don’t have a fondness for it. The taste of Mendosa’s clam chowder is overly clammy, and there’s not enough creamy potatoes; this is only my personal view though. Back to the lasagna soup: a large factor of this being my favourite soup is that lasagna is my favourite food, the perfect package: delicious ground meat, vegetables, cheese, and tomato sauce, all encased in noodles. Here it’s in soup form. My rating on this was an 8 out of 10, mainly due to the fact that I love lasagna soup, and this is the only one that I have tasted so far.

My third and final meal was a bagel with cream cheese and a mexican Coca-cola from the Goodlife bakery. The bagel is just the right amount of cooked to be crispy and crunchy on the edge. The only downside to the bagel is that the cream cheese is usually applied too heavily. When ordering one, I ask for light cream cheese so as not to take away from the overall taste of the bagel. With a mexican Coke to wash it down it makes the perfect five dollar lunch. The score on this meal is a 7 out of 10 mainly because it is a little more expensive than the others and can be overloaded with cream-cheese sometimes. 

Overall Mendo is a great place for students to get lunch in. If the students are on a budget, it just takes a little time looking for the cheap and healthy meals. I hope you’ve enjoyed this guide to lunches in Mendo when you’ve only “got five on it.”