As I mentioned, my back has been a bit cranky lately. Nothing crazy, but bad enough that I didn’t want to spend any more time in front of a computer than I had to this weekend, delaying this Sandwich of the Week until today, when I have to spend time in front of a computer anyway.

This deli was recommended to me by Adam Zagoria, who writes a fine blog about multiple levels of basketball for this here blog network. You should check that out if you don’t read it already.

Also, I really wanted to avoid pork for my friends that keep Kosher, since I already know next week’s sandwich will not and there has been pork on like the last 50 sandwiches. But this deli didn’t have any specialty sandwich board or anything, and when I panic I order bacon on my sandwiches. My bad, again.

The sandwich: Spicy chicken cutlet with bacon, cheddar and mayonnaise on a kaiser roll from Rocky’s Deli on Saw Mill River Road in Millwood.

Important background information: Doesn’t sound like that interesting of a sandwich, right? WRONG!

I know I’ve reviewed a bunch of sandwiches that are essentially fried chicken, bacon and cheese, and truth be told that’s pretty much my go-to when I’m ordering a hot sandwich at a deli I’ve never before tried. Like with burgers at restaurants, I figure a chicken cutlet is a good standard by which to judge delis. If the deli does it well, you can trust it’s a good deli, go back there and start experimenting with other sandwiches. If it sucks, don’t bother.

But more and more lately I’ve noticed spicy chicken cutlets on deli menus. I think this might be en route to deli standardization.

I remember when I was in third or fourth grade, a couple bar-and-grill-type restaurants on Long Island started carrying Buffalo wings, and they were like this amazing new thing but they were all over the map: some places served them breaded, some had them dry with the sauce on the side. Now most bars serve standard Buffalo wings because everyone has wised up to how ridiculously awesome they are.

So I think — trendspotting baby! — that might be happening with the spicy chicken cutlet at delis. No deli in Rockville Centre served spicy chicken cutlets when I was growing up, but I saw that they were new on the menu at the Cherry Valley Deli in Queens and I’m pretty sure I’ve recently spotted them a few other places as well. Also Wendy’s now has those Spicy Crispy Chicken Nuggets.

They don’t have spicy chicken cutlets at the delis closest to me in Westchester, but my pocket of Westchester is pretty reliably behind the times food-wise. There’s no Chipotle or Five Guys yet and I swear they still sell salsa in the International foods section of the grocery store.

What it looks like:

How it tastes: Tremendous. I’ll say it right now: Just barely shy of the Hall of Fame.

When I ordered the chicken cutlet, the dude pulled it from the pile and dropped it in the deep fryer, which is always an outstanding sign. No microwaved nonsense at Rocky’s Deli; you’re spicy chicken cutlet is coming at you hot and greasy, the way Colonel Sanders intended.

The breading on the cutlet, due to the frying, was nice and crispy. As for the spicy part: Good. It wasn’t overwhelmingly spicy or spicy in the Buffalo hot saucy style, it had more of a black peppery kick, a nice but not overpowering amount of seasoning. The flavor, actually, was not terribly unlike that of those Wendy’s spicy nuggets, only it obviously tasted way less like it came from some sort of fast-food power, not that this site judges anything produced by delicious fast-food powder.

The bacon was delicious, since it was bacon, and well-prepared bacon at that. It could have stood to be better distributed, though — the only thing really holding this thing back from the Hall of Fame. About a quarter of this sandwich didn’t have bacon.

Cheddar cheese and mayo you know about. The roll was good, fresh. Appropriate for a deli sandwich.

What it’s worth: I’m not exactly sure since my wife got a sandwich too and we both got beverages and we didn’t get an itemized receipt or anything. But I think about $7.

How it rates: 89 out of 100. Check this place out if you need a pit-stop off the Taconic. And look out for spicy chicken cutlets. They’re coming.

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.

At the deli, when people would come in and ask for an Italian hero, I used to always be like, “Aww, I thought I was your Italian hero.” I don’t think anyone ever even thought it was funny including me, it just sort of became vaguely Pavlovian after a while. Plus every so often it would really confuse and/or alienate a customer, and that’s a pretty fun thing to do when you’re 21 and you’ve been standing behind a deli counter for most of the summer.

Then it turned out it’s actually funnier when people order sandwiches that don’t sound like they describe Giuseppe Garibaldi. “Aww, I thought I was your Roast Beef and Cheddar.” “Aww, I thought I was your honey-maple turkey with bacon and muenster cheese on pumpernickel.”

The sandwich: Ham cappy, salami, soppressata and fresh mozzarella on a kaiser roll with oil and vinegar, from Park Italian Gourmet on 45th between 5th and 6th in Manhattan.

The construction: All of the things in the name of the sandwich, which doesn’t really have a proper name — it’s just what I ordered.

Important background information: This part of Midtown, as I’ve certainly griped before, is something of a wasteland for interesting food options. Occasionally a good truck will come through the neighborhood and there are a few notable regular carts, plus a few of the food-courty options in the Rockefeller Center concourse are decent. But for the most part if you want to find a notable and inexpensive takeout lunch, you need to do some searching.

Park Italian Gourmet is an oasis of sorts. It does not at all look like it belongs in Midtown, a couple blocks south of Rockefeller Plaza. It’s an old-school, no-frills type of place with a wide variety of Italian meats and a small hot-food area for parmigiana and such. It is generally what I recommend to people in the area looking to avoid the bland corporate food bar places.

What it looks like:

How it tastes: Comforting, in a way. This certainly isn’t the most remarkable sandwich I’ve had or even the best sandwich I’ve had in Midtown, but it’s very solid. Tastes how a good Italian combo from a deli should taste: Delicious.

Soppressata, if you’re unfamiliar, is like a more coarsely ground salami. It’s maybe a tiny bit spicier and more peppery than its cousin, and equally salty. It’s one of my favorite lunchmeats, which is saying something.

In terms of the meats here, the ham cappy gets a bit overwhelmed by the stronger flavors of the salami and soppressata, so it mostly serves to add meaty bulk to offset the cheese — a valuable sandwich commodity, no doubt.

As with many good Italian sandwiches, the star is the mozzarella cheese. Fresh and creamy with its subtle milky taste, it is the perfect complement to the powerful meats. It’s weird; the meats are obviously more flavorful than the cheese, but somehow the cheese still feels like the focus of the sandwich. This is why people wrap mozzarella with pepperoni or prosciutto and serve it as an appetizer, I suppose.

Also, the deli-man at Park Italian Gourmet did me the favor of putting the mozzarella in the center of the sandwich, sandwiched itself by the meats. It meant every bite had a nice blend of meat, cheese and bread; there were no bread-and-cheese bites followed by meat-and-bread bites.

If I were making the sandwich myself I might have gone a tiny bit heavier on the oil and vinegar. The salami and soppressata are greasy enough to ensure that the sandwich could not be dry, but the tang from the vinegar really adds a nice kick whenever it’s present. I’m not sure what type of vinegar is standard at Park Italian Gourmet — I probably should’ve specified if I’m going to be so picky about it — but I would have preferred balsamic, a bit more pungent than whatever is here.

What it’s worth: $6.50. For a good lunch in Midtown that’s an absolute steal.

How it rates: Hmm. 81 out of 100. A really good sandwich but not a mind-blowing one.