Lunch

The annual event for kids will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at Kings Contrivance, 7251 Eden Brook Drive. Tickets are $5 and include a craft, pizza lunch and dessert. Each child will have a photo taken with Santa. Call 410-381-9600 for more information.

Behind the nondescript storefront with its necessary neon window signs, Towson Best does indeed serve some of the best Cantonese food in the Towson/North Baltimore area. A group of young and unfailingly friendly owners and staff greet all who enter and set the tone for casual lunches and dinners that make you not only want to return for the food and but also to patronize a place run by such nice people. The room is divided by long planters. To your right is a tidy eight-stool sushi bar with its pristine fish and smiling chef, small booths and a few tables.

Shoot your lunch. Not like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who now only eats what he kills. With a camera. Take a photograph of your lunch, or anything, and upload it to Picture This, Baltimore . For the second time, the Baltimore Sun is chronicling a day in the life of Baltimore. If you have a camera or a cell phone with a camera, we want to see what you see -- the places you go, the people you meet, whatever else you may encounter on one Tuesday in October. Upload your photos from Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Instagram and more.  To upload via Twitter, send a tweet to @baltimoresun with the hashtag #picturethis.

The gang at Mission BBQ is inviting the public to have lunch with a group of World War II veterans visting from California. You'll find no sunshine patriots at Mission BBQ , these guys stick to their mission of honoring Americans in uniform every day. So, go, and get there at noon for the daily singing of the National Anthem, and stay for the good barbecue and a chat with the vets.

Over lunch at the Capital Grille on Thursday, the two old friends enjoyed an upbeat, forward-looking conversation. Kurt L. Schmoke had the tuna steak salad, Sheila Dixon the salmon with vegetables. Schmoke, a former mayor, imparted an encouraging message to Dixon, the soon-to-be former mayor who announced Wednesday that she will resign as part of a plea with prosecutors to end her corruption case. "I just wanted to remind her there will be better days down the road," said Schmoke, who served as mayor from 1988 to 1999 and is now dean of the Howard University Law School.

Those folks at Mission BBQ are serious about their commitment to honoring America's men and women in uniform. At Thursday's, "Lunch with the Heroes" event, the Glen Burnie restaurant will be providing a complimentary lunch to more than 25 Wounded Warrior Project alumni. The owners of Mission BBQ , Bill Kraus and Steve Newton, will also present a $10,000 check to the Wounded Warrior Project, money they've raised through the sale of through the sale of the restaurant's American Heroes Cups.

With the Tortellini Boscaiola ($10), Pazani (a combination of the words pasta, pizza and panini) delivers a rich cream sauce that's remarkably pumpkin orange for a rose. This is a tenaciously clingy sauce. You could complain that the sauce isn't as silky as you might expect in a rose cream, but that's nitpicking. Any pasta style would work with this Boscaiola, but stick with the cheese-stuffed tri-color tortellini — Pazani presents it al dente. Boscaiola recipes can call for sausage or bacon.

For the restaurants of Fells Point, the recent opening of the $100-million Thames Street Wharf Building on Harbor Point was effectively overnight delivery for 600 new Morgan Stanley mouths to feed lunch. Positioned strategically between the pubs and taverns of lower Fells Point and the more upscale offerings of Harbor East, this new building has no in-house eating facility of its own. There are dozens of easy walks from the building's front door, and one of the closest is RA Sushi Bar Restaurant (1390 Lancaster St., 410-522-3200)

As reported in the Baltimore Sun and elsewhere, Robert De Niro had lunch on Saturday at Chazz: A Bronx Original, the Harbor East restaurant opened this summer by his friend, the actor Chazz Palminteri. De Niro was traveling on Saturday from Philadelphia, where he's filming a movie, to Washington, D.C., for the annual Kennedy Center Honors. I was at the restaurant when De Niro visited, with a dog's-eye view of the excitement. Actually it was less exciting than sweet. Palminteri and his Baltimore partners, the Vitale family, were obviously delighted that De Niro, a noted restaurateur in his own right, was coming for a visit.

Geisha is one of the few restaurants I can think of that looks better during the daytime than at night. Geisha's dining rooms are below ground level, down a flight of stairs from its entrance on Charles Street, and at night you can feel a little sad in them, as though you've been confined to the basement while adults are having a party upstairs. By day, though, the room's rusts, cherries and ambers resolve themselves handsomely along clean midcentury lines, and the ambience feels more intentional, like an executive dining room.

Open only since last month, Luigi's Italian Deli in Hampden avoids any of the missteps that invariably are part of a new restaurant. Luigi's, and several of the small restaurants on 36th Street in Hampden, aka The Avenue, belie the old adage that patrons are reluctant to walk up stairs to a restaurant. At the top of these steps is a pleasant porch furnished with four tiny tables. Sipping a Blood Orange Pellegrino and tackling one of the specialty sandwiches makes scaling a few steps a small price to pay. There is also a spacious patio out back.

This coming week offers a chance to visit two worthy Maryland landmarks. The normally off-limits Gibson Island Club will be open, and you can enjoy a lunch overlooking the Magothy. And I paid an advance visit to the Shrine of St. Anthony at Folly Quarter, a remarkable Roman Catholic monastery complex in western Howard County. Being a fan of pre-World War II buildings and architecture, I opted for a preview of the 1931 monastery, which is open daily for Masses, confessions and other functions.

The downtown Baltimore lunch crowd can look forward to two new fast - food spots opening in May -- Sushi Express and Crazy Kabobs. The new vendors will fill empty space in the food court at The Gallery mall across East Pratt Street from Harborplace. As The Baltimore Business Journal reported Tuesday, the openings are part of changes that also include Saladworks closing about a month ago. Mall owner General Growth Properties is working on filling that spot to boost the seven-vendor food court's occupancy from its current 85 percent, said General Growth spokesman Greg Harris.

The Village Square Cafe is a modest, bright and spotlessly clean place in Roland Park with few pretensions. It understands that delivering the right experience must begin with the owners and run down the line to servers, cooks and bus boys. It seems a simple enough credo for success, and here, they do it well. The lunch menu is understandably heavy on sandwiches, but there are also pizza, wraps and omelets. The great list of sandwiches ranges from $7.95 for the BLT to $9.95 for the half-pound burger and fries, with the other sandwiches, including a stellar Reuben, priced at $8.95.

Those folks at Mission BBQ are serious about their commitment to honoring America's men and women in uniform. At Thursday's, "Lunch with the Heroes" event, the Glen Burnie restaurant will be providing a complimentary lunch to more than 25 Wounded Warrior Project alumni. The owners of Mission BBQ , Bill Kraus and Steve Newton, will also present a $10,000 check to the Wounded Warrior Project, money they've raised through the sale of through the sale of the restaurant's American Heroes Cups.

Meet the author The Howard County Historical Society will host a book signing and discussion for Jehanne Wake, author of "Sisters of Fortune: America's Caton Sisters at Home and Abroad," at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 25, at 8328 Court Ave. The Caton sisters, known as the "Three American Graces," were the granddaughters of Charles Carroll of Carrollton. Refreshments will be provided. Information: 410-480-3250. Around town Blood pressure screenings Stop in from 9 a.m. to noon Tuesdays at the Ellicott City Senior Center for free blood pressure readings by a registered nurse.

O'Malley is out to lunch! ("O'Malley: Taxes on the table in 2012," Aug. 21.) When will he ever take any responsibility for anything? It is always the Republicans' fault. Thank goodness he will be gone in three years. In your article, House Speaker Michael E. Busch says that the state has a backlog of $6 billion to $8 billion in school maintenance. OK, I do not deny that estimate, but he goes on to say that if the state were to fund these projects, it would create 25,000 jobs. That comes to $240,000 to $320,000 a job. Great work if you can find it. Only if we had moved forward with slots in 2003!