Sweet Peppers is great little stop in Baxter Village

BY John Marks - Lake Wylie Pilot

Despite coaxing from the menu, I didn't actually “taste life” by eating peppers. But what I did taste left me thinking I'll be back for another chance at it.

Sweet Peppers Deli, a Market Street sandwich, soup and salad shop open about a year now in Fort Mill's Baxter Village, made for a quick lunch stop and break from work on a Wednesday afternoon. One look at the postcard perfect weather enjoyed by several outdoor diners, café style on the corner block, and I wished I had longer to stay. A friend and I walked in to find brightly colored walls, a large ordering counter with overhead menu and plenty of booth and table seating. Cleverly positioned just above the handheld menus sat a board of daily specials, on this day featuring a Buffalo chicken panini.

Ok, let's get it out of the way. I didn't know what a panini was. Call me uneducated, call me stupid — didn't matter. They had me at Buffalo chicken.

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My friend went with the TBC, a sandwich with layers of turkey, bacon and cheddar cheese. How either of us picked anything from the menu without calling in a lifeline I may never know, with more than 50 menu choices before we even hit starters or desserts, each one as tempting as the last. Choices include starters ranging from a cup of soup ($2.59) to chili nachos ($5.45), 11 salads including the Waldorf ($7.99), a seven-item lighter fare menu ($3.29 to $6.99) with information on calorie and fat content, specialty sandwiches and wraps like The Blitz (roast beef, turkey and ham for $5.99), Muffaletta (thinly-sliced ham and Genoa salami for $6.29) and Bulldog (roast beef, kielbasa and spicy jalapeno pepper cheese for $5.99), several styles of loaded potatoes ($4.99-$6.69) and even six paninis ($6.69-$7.29).

As I learned, a panini is a pressed and grilled sandwich. Mine came with Buffalo chicken, blue cheese crumbles, lettuce, tomato and pickles. Usually I'm about as interested in eating pickles as I am gum off the bottom of my shoe, but in this sandwich it worked. The Buffalo chicken didn't overpower everything, and the sandwich ate like a champ even without the accompanying ranch dressing (although let's not kid ourselves, saying a sandwich is tasty without ranch is like complimenting a Ferrari without gasoline). Also tasty was the cheesy pasta salad, one of five different side options. My friend also enjoyed her TBC with chips, but admittedly we both hurried a bit to get to dessert.

Sweet Peppers offers an impulse buyer's paradise (or purgatory, depending) when it comes to desserts. On display were the chocolate caramel fudge pecan pie, mile high cheesecake, strawberry wave cheesecake and carrot cake, among others. Cookies baked fresh daily also line the display. These desserts are large enough to share gladly, and from personal experience the strawberry cheesecake tastes as good as it looks.

In fact, the entire experience at Sweet Peppers tasted as good as it looked from the outside coming in, from the friendly staff to the free wi-fi, from cups large enough to be their own refills to the generous portions. About which, did I mention the potatoes? We didn't order one, but we witnessed one. They probably needed an Idaho county zoning permit to yank it out of the ground. Seriously, this thing had its own gravitational pull.

Hopefully, the Fort Mill location — right now the only Carolinas store of 16 shops in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana — won't be the last to arrive locally. More folks around here would probably enjoy the taste of life it offers, even if it means eating peppers.

John Marks, Lake Wylie Pilot