Lunch Adventure Department Of Motor Vehicles

Sometimes we find ourselves in odd places where a plate of fresh fruit isn’t possible, and situational constraints require creative action to avoid eating out of a vending machine. Other times we just need to escape the stuffy confines of traditional restaurant dining, so we embark on Lunch Adventures.

Department Of Motor Vehicles (4802 Sheboygan Ave., 608-266-1466)

Why you’re really there: If you have any interest in voting, you will need an ID, thanks to new laws passed by our cheerfully deranged political leaders and their program of limiting government participation from the young, the marginal, and the socially disenfranchised. See you at the DMV.

You won’t find this in most restaurants: Everything is a little chipped and bent in this Star Wars-like “used universe” where tubs of lasagna, steamed vegetables, and drooping hamburgers jostle with racks of Fritos and Snickers bars. Limp-looking salads and softening turkey grinders sit forlornly in mostly empty refrigerators. Gently congealing meatloaf sends off an aroma triggering sense memories of the cafeteria in junior high. Choosing was hard for all the wrong reasons, but a meaty, mildly spicy slab of taco pizza was imbued with oil and entirely filling, certainly much better than the enclosed rotating platter with heat lights housing it suggested. Could these rotating pizza-warming gizmos become the de rigueur kitsch item in kitchens across the Hamptons?

Delightful discovery: Daily specials are not limited to casseroles, and indeed display some measure of creativity in working with no doubt austere budgetary restrictions. Mac and cheese, potato salad, baked ziti, and Salisbury steaks, ahoy!

Signature selection: “Walking tacos” are the big thing, according to one affable and probably trustworthy staffer. It’s not that the tacos get up and walk by themselves—though that seems entirely possible in the grim confines of the borderline-decrepit cafeteria, dated by even public-school standards—but rather, it’s that you can walk around eating them, which everyone knows is impossible with an actual taco. The A.V. Club was all in on the ballyhooed tacos, but was then told, “Sorry, you can’t get them today.”

Chance of a return visit: The DMV is like death, or taxes: wholly inevitable. Why not have a Lunch Adventure before waiting in interminable lines for the right to vote?