quick-lunch

In a quick-lunch restaurant near the old center of Kabul, amid a jumble of shops selling bicycles, mattresses, paint and tools, two off-duty traffic police officers were eating platters of rice and meat.

They met regularly in this cuarto de azotea, with Gilberto Owen too, interrupting their sessions only to eat hot-cakes in a nearby joint called Quick-lunch – an American-style eatery quite different to the French-style salons where other intellectuals gathered, and also radically different to the cantinas and pulquerías that Novo visited in his nightly excursions.

But in today’s age of longer work hours and lower job security, even the typical American quick-lunch is disappearing.

This is going to be a quick-lunch affair.

To think there are men—you know it and I know it and he was afraid of it—who'd have steered him to a quick-lunch and put him against soft-boiled eggs!'