Here’s another sandwich recommended by a reader like you. This particular sandwich has been endorsed many times over, but first by Carl. He actually emailed me about it back in May, before I was even writing about sandwiches on this site with any regularity.

Please, if you know of an exceptional or exceptionally interesting sandwich — especially if it’s easily accessible via subway from Midtown or by car from Westchester — let me know about it. You can email me at tberg@sny.tv or use the contact form above.

The sandwich: Spicy pork meatball hero with spicy red sauce and mozzarella, from The Meatball Shop, 84 Stanton St. in Manhattan.

The construction: Several (three?) spicy pork meatballs smashed and spread out onto a baguette with fresh mozzarella cheese. Then they toast the whole thing so the cheese is melted.

Important background information: As I’ve noted several times, my mother is Italian and I am fiercely loyal to her meatballs. Though I love meatballs in concept, I rarely order them from restaurants because I know they will not match the ones I grew up enjoying. Mom’s are a bit less bready than most, I’ve found, so they’re more coarse: delicious hunks of well-seasoned ground beef. And I guess she fries them at a hotter temperature than most people do, because they maintain a bit of a crispness on the outside that I rarely find in other meatballs. Superb, honestly. The showpiece of her very impressive array of culinary delights.

But the Meatball Shop is all the rage in the trendy Lower East Side, and though I’m not what you’d call trendy myself, I figure when trends overlap with sandwiches I should probably get on that. Plus a bunch of people whose opinions I respect told me I must eat this sandwich.

I trekked down there on Thursday and the place was packed. No open tables and people stacked about three deep at the bar. This is sort of pathetic, but since I was alone and starving I wound up ordering the sandwich to go, hopping in a cab to Grand Central and eating it in the dining concourse while waiting for my train back to the suburbs.

What it looks like:

How it tastes: Hell and yes.

Believe it or not, the thing that first jumps out at you on this sandwich is the baguette. As mentioned, it’s toasted so it’s got a great crispness on the outside, and it’s sturdy enough to withstand a 10-minute cab ride’s worth of grease accumulation from the meatballs and cheese. That’s impressive.

And the pork is excellent. Since the meatballs are smashed up the experience is more akin to eating a sloppy joe (the ground-meat kind, not the Jersey kind), only if the sloppy joe were made with loose sausage meat from a spicy Italian sausage. That’s about as best as I can describe the seasoning, I think — it’s a melange of flavors, though principally it is spicy in the red-peppery way that things can be spicy.

Next time I venture to the Meatball Shop, though — and this sandwich was good enough to guarantee there will be a next time — I might try something different than the spicy pork meatball and spicy sauce combination. The Meatball Shop’s sandwich offerings are fully customizable: pick a meatball, pick a sauce, pick a cheese.

And though the spicy pork with spicy sauce was recommended by the Grub Street sandwich list, among others, I wonder if the sandwich might be a little more interesting with one of the other sauces. I won’t dismiss it as a one-note sandwich because there were too many good flavors in the meat itself, but I found myself wondering which flavors were coming from the meat and which from the sauce, and it seemed like there was some overlap there.

And due to the spice and the powerful meat flavor, the mozzarella served more as a binding agent to hold the meatballs near the bread than an additional source of flavor. Not that I’m complaining — this thing was messy enough with the cheese and would likely have ruined my shirt without it. But I do think fresh mozzarella loses something when it’s fully melted. Don’t quote me on that because it’s a theory I’m going to have to revisit, but I feel like all my favorite sandwiches incorporating fresh mozzarella pile thick slices on top and don’t mess with them.

What it’s worth: Cost $9, and it was a lot of food. It was a good enough sandwich that I kept plowing through it even after I was stuffed, which happened about 2/3 of the way in. Cleaned the plate. Came with a small but pretty decent footnote of a salad, too.

How it rates: I struggled with this one. Again, a reminder that all these ratings are completely subjective and I might very well rate any sandwich differently if I ate it at a different time, in a different mood or whatever. It’s three days later and I’m still thinking about how great the meatball hero was, but at no point did it feel quite like a Hall of Famer. I’m going to give it an 88 out of 100, and remind you that this might be a Hall of Fame sandwich to anyone who didn’t grow up with a mother that makes unbelievable meatballs.