Remember Russ, the sandwich antagonist? He tipped me off to Melt Shop, a new grilled cheese place in Midtown East. We took a trip there this week for a “lunch meeting,” which essentially means an hour of me yelling at him about why I should have a TV show, especially if it could be about sandwiches.

The sandwich: Aged Cheddar from Melt Shop, 53rd and Lexington in Manhattan.

The construction: Aged cheddar cheese and maple-glazed bacon on buttered, grilled sourdough bread.

Important background information: I wanted this week’s to be a vegetarian-friendly sandwich review. I promise. Obviously meat means a lot to me, but I recognize there are people who can’t or won’t eat it for a variety of legitimate reasons, and several of those people asked in the recent survey for a review of a sandwich they could enjoy. And let it never be said that TedQuarters isn’t about giving the people what they want.

It all seemed set up so perfectly: Russ wanted to try this place, I had been in the mood for a straight-up grilled cheese for weeks, and several of you wanted a vegetarian-friendly sandwich review. But as so often happens with well-laid plans, bacon interfered. My apologies.

I regret nothing.

What it looks like:

How it tastes: Good. Buttery. Mapley.

I think the big surprise here is how sweet it was. I saw “maple-glazed bacon” but I read it as “maple-smoked bacon,” and while the latter generally has a touch of sweet maple flavor, the former is apparently coated in sugary maple syrup.

It’s hardly overpowering on the sandwich and I’m not here to tell you it’s a bad thing, it just wasn’t what I expected due to a reading comprehension failure. It actually made for a nice complement to the cheese, a particularly pungent brand of cheddar with that sort of earthy flavor you might recognize from a good hunk of sharp Cabot.

Whoa, did I just call cheese “earthy”? Are these getting too obnoxious? I’ll cop to ripping that term off the Wikipedia page for Cheddar cheese (a solid read, btw). I couldn’t come up with the right word to describe strong cheddar flavor. It doesn’t really taste like earth though; it tastes like a strong cheddar cheese. I mean I guess technically it tastes like the fraction of Earth that is occupied by cheddar cheese, but now we’re getting into semantics.

I guess I should disclose here that I hate most food writing. But as I do this more and more I find myself struggling for different ways to describe food, and it’s a great challenge to do that without straying into the realm of the pretentious. If at any point it becomes clear I need a swift ass-kicking, let me know and I’ll find someone to administer it.

Anyway, point is it’s a pretty good sandwich. The sourdough is nice and hearty, grilled to the right level of toastiness, the cheese is melted appropriately and somehow not too greasy.

The bacon could have been a little crispier. That’s pretty much the main thing that goes wrong with bacon, and it happened here. The outside of the sandwich was crispy, but when I want bacon on a sandwich I want it for it’s bacony crunch. Also for it’s delicious bacon flavor. There was plenty of that, but little of the bacony crunch.

What it’s worth: Cost $6.50, plus about 25 minutes of waiting in line because apparently Melt Shop is blowing up. $6.50 is a bit steep for a grilled cheese and bacon — it combined with a handful of Russ’ tater tots to make for a solid lunch but it was not an overwhelming amount of food. Also, might as well wait until the hype dies down and the line shortens a bit.

How it rates: Russ, you may recall, complains that too many of the sandwiches here are rated in the 80s. So on the elevator ride back up to the office, I asked him how he’d rate it (he had the same sandwich I did). He said it was a really good sandwich, but not worthy of the Hall of Fame. Welcome to my world, Russ. 80 out of 100.