no. 102: the foundations of empire
or, a review of recent sandwiches
The green bean sandwich from Meat Cheese Bread in Portland.
Green beans griddled just to squeaking, then ushered into alignment. Soft boiled egg, too much aioli, and a superfluous bacon relish on ciabatta. Surprisingly ergonomic, which is to say, not totally unmanageable. A delight in the moment but on reflection a missed opportunity, a single genius idea developed according to a formula.
Ditch the relish, quadruple the amount of parmesan, and add a lashing of black pepper, or perhaps an abbreviated sauce au poivre in place of the aioli, and maybe you have something glorious and new. But who am I to complain — this was made with care and eaten at a beat up sidewalk table in the early summer sun.
Oregon Bay pink shrimp smørbrød from Maurice. Trout roe and a ballgown of sweet cicely.
The sweet cicely didn’t really have anything to say to the rest of the sandwich, but made a pile of comma-shaped grubs look like a wedding bouquet. Representative of Maurice as a whole — a bit twee, phenomenally competent. Clean cut, luminous food, sailing out on antique china from kitchen that’s smaller than some ranges. Everything, in spirit, came with a doily, or at least a gold-leaf rim.
The shrimp had a delicate, sago pearl bite, and tasted pleasantly estuarine, shrimp for people who prefer crab. The minimum allowable size for these shrimp is 160/lb — approximately 3 grams per shrimp. They’re sold cooked and peeled, which sent me down a rabbit hole trying to figure out how the hell a commercial fishery peels shrimp this small. My curiosity remains unsatisfied, if you know how a commercial shrimp peeling machine actually works, please tell me.
Greek salad in a sandwich, from Dos Hermanos in Portland.
Genius. Lightning in a sandwich. Would eat every day if I could. Rarely do medium and message tango so nicely. A partially eviscerated colonial baguette filled with an overdressed Greek salad that was run through a wood chipper. The chopping makes the salad a perfect sandwich filling: each mouthful is a textural kaleidoscope, but the sandwich is easy to eat, with nothing that pulls or slides. Remarkably well engineered, something you can actually get your mouth around, and composed such that you can easily bite through.
I don’t think “colonial baguette” is actually a term of art, but I’m referring here to the tradition of ultra-fluffy, cottony, almost flavorless bread often found in ex-colonies. In the US, they’re most commonly encountered in banh mi. Wonderbread has a little pull, and tastes of malt and sweeteners, the bleached crumb of these loaves tastes faintly of nothing (or perhaps of the ghost of rice flour) and bites clean. Their crusts, when fresh, fragment explosively, and this was exactly the bread this sandwich needed.
Lengua, tripa, suadero, and barbacoa de chivo tacos from Taco Mix in NYC.
Are tacos sandwiches? The eternal question. I’ve dreamt about returning to Taco Mix for 6 years. The experience was worth the wait, eating standing at the counter squashed between a cook and a delivery rider, salsa running down our fingers. The salsas still feel urgent and improvisational, but maybe my tastes have moved on.
Taco Mix griddles their lengua and tripa, hard enough that each morsel has a steakhouse crust, but this dries the meat and homogenizes the texture somewhat. At least the execution is expert: the only thing worse than dry tripe is dry tripe that hasn’t acquired a crisp edge. This is certainly a legitimate stylistic choice, but I probably prefer the drippiness of Ramirez now.
On the other hand, at 9pm on a Tuesday night in East Harlem, you can commune with your tacos undisturbed by tourists, influencers, or bros of any stripe, and this increasingly feels like the kind of privilege you can’t buy in New York.
An S&P Regular (pastrami, Russian dressing, cherry peppers) and a no. 8 (corned beef, chopped liver, Russian dressing) at S&P Lunch in NYC.
The Regular looks sloppy but eats restrained, the no. 8 looks buttoned up but slobbers all over you. The chopped liver is runnier than most — I’m not sure you can get enough schmaltz in a traditional chopped liver to make it flow like this. Add the Russian dressing and it’s richness upon richness, velvet over suede. Meanwhile, the pickled cherry peppers and the bulk of the soft roll keep the Regular honest. Highly, highly recommended. I wonder how much Russian dressing they go through each day.
Harissa cauliflower from Yellow in DC.
Razored cabbage, feta, lots of labne. Basic and predictable as a power ballad, and you don’t have to be in the right mood to find it satisfying. A sandwich designed with an eye on empire. Vaughn asserts that sandwiches are the best food business to be in because they can be made by well-intentioned but sloppy cooks, and this could be exhibit A.
The sandwich was great, but the operational details were spectacular. Registers right by the door so virtually the entire line has to spill into the street in the instagram-approved style. Sandwich jigs in the kitchen, color-coded packaging like at McDonald’s, foil envelopes for some, parchment for others, a continuous production line of pita so good the other details hardly matter. Coming soon to a city near you?
Related: the first issue of this publication was also a review of a (then recent) sandwich designed with an eye on empire.
And for more sandwich content, this classic from the archives, which is more representative of the usual vein here.