Cesaroni's Cafe & Deli

Cesaroni's Cafe and Deli is a cafe and a deli on West State Street in Sycamore, where the sandwiches and the coffee share equal billing and Nathan and Lily get named by repeat customers who eat there often enough to learn the staff. The deli platters travel for parties, gluten-free options run through the sandwich menu, and one college student studied here through to close on a recent visit, which is the kind of stamina the room enables when the timing works out and the lunch crowd has thinned. The space is clean, the chairs comfortable. Free wifi makes a long study session possible if you pick your window around the lunch rush. The trade-off is the seating fills up at lunch. One customer specifically said the place was full and could use more space, and the report is consistent enough to plan around if you're showing up at noon hoping for a four-top. Order the veggie breakfast sandwich for the morning, the honey latte (one regular calls it her best ever, which is a high bar even granting the regular-customer hyperbole that comes with the territory), a half farmer salad with tomato basil soup for the lunch combo, a regular latte, an iced coffee customized at the counter with whatever syrups or milks fit your day. The lunchtime sandwich crowd, gluten-free eaters, and students looking for an off-peak study spot are the audience this place serves best, and the deli-cafe hybrid model is rare enough in Sycamore that the loyalty makes sense. Bigger groups at peak lunch hours will be standing, sometimes outside on the sidewalk, sometimes waiting for a table to clear in the front window. Time it right and you've got a sandwich, a soup, a latte, and a table to yourself for two hours, which is the upper limit of what a cafe-deli can reasonably deliver on a weekday in a college town. The party platters are worth knowing about if you're catering a small event, since the kitchen handles the prep and the order goes out the door clean. The honey latte is the drink to test the hype on.