No word yet on if I secured press credentials for the forthcoming Vendy Awards, but it seems I at least landed myself on the distro list for press releases leading up to the event. And from that I found this, by far the most intriguing of the Rookie of the Year nominees, the Mexicue truck. Anyone had it? SPOILER ALERT: This will probably be a sandwich of the week sometime soon after the next time they come to midtown.
But there are two separate groups vying for credit in what some might consider the research arm of a chocolate factory war.
The candy maker Mars is expected to announce on Wednesday that a project it financed has essentially completed the raw sequence of the genome of the cacao tree, and that it would make the data freely available to researchers.
The announcement upstages a consortium involving French government laboratories and Pennsylvania State University that is backed in part by a competitor of Mars, Hershey. This group says it has also completed the sequence, but cannot discuss it until its paper analyzing the genome is published in a scientific journal.
Whoa, nelly. The article says that understanding the chocolate genome sequence should help chocolatiers create more chocolate more deliciously, which seems awesome at first but is actually kind of terrifying when you think of it.
The French government is normally considered benign to the point of punchlines, but I’ve read Brave New World, and I’ve got to think that if someone were creating a drug to tranquilize society, it starts with a mass-produced super-chocolate.
Also, who the hell knew that Mars and Hershey were into this type of stuff? Mars has a research arm? I mean I guess that makes sense, but that’s so completely ominous.
And furthermore, I just now considered the implications of a chocolate war. Chocolate war! That’s about the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard of. You can call me naive, but I like to envision a world where all wars are chocolate wars — not like that book, but like replacing gunpowder with pure molten chocolate, and then when soldiers get hit they’re all covered in chocolate, and they say, “OK, you got me,” and they have to stand down, but the upside is free chocolate. Kind of like paintball, I guess, but the guns shoot chocolate truffles. Holy crap why has no one invented that yet?
Finally, you know who’s behind all this research at Mars? The article calls him Howard Yana-Shapiro, but you may know him better as Santa Claus:
Huge hat tip to Brendan Bilko for pointing me to this link yielding a ton of awesome information.
First of all, there’s a blog about pizza called “Me, Myself and Pie” by a guy who is working on a feature-length documentary about pizza. That alone is great news for everybody. Because who doesn’t like pizza?
Second, it brings word of the Pizza Hacker, a San Francisco based unlicensed street vendor who modified a standard Weber grill to turn it into an outdoor wood-burning pizza oven, which is one of the most awesome things I’ve ever heard.
I’m insanely envious of people who can build things. I come from a long line of people who make real, substantive stuff. My grandfather was an engineer and inventor with dozens of patents. My dad designs buildings and sometimes paints pictures of Vin Diesel and Usher riding into battle on a chariot pulled by white tigers. My late brother made robots. I write about sandwiches. It’s downright humiliating when I think about it, but I never had the patience for the type of precision that manner of work required.
Anyway, that’s my issue, not yours. The pizza hacker’s Twitter says he’s in Ohio right now, but I will attempt to dispatch the good folks at the TedQuarters San Francisco desk for a report once he returns to the Bay Area.
Also, apropos of nothing besides interesting street-vendor fellows, does anyone remember the dude who used to set up outside of CBGB’s with all the fresh produce? A quick Googling tells me the cart was called “From Atlantis with Love,” and he made some unbelievable burritos/wraps/gyros/various street-meat sandwiches.
Anyone know if that guy is still somewhere in the city? I tend to doubt he stayed around that corner now that the venue closed down. I feel like I may have asked this of readers before but since I can’t remember eating one of those burritos in the past year, I don’t think I’ve gotten a satisfying answer, so the search continues.
Concerned that my experience at Ricobene’s would set the bar unfairly high for whatever sandwich I next reviewed, so I wanted to go someplace I had eaten a few times before — not just so I could be certain my writeup would be fair, but also so I could recalibrate my own personal sandwich barometer, cast wildly off-kilter by the Windy City wonder.
Problem is, though I’ve been to Island Burgers and Shakes a bunch of times before, I’ve never gotten a firm handle on it. People keep telling me its amazing. When my wife — then girlfriend — and I were on a feverish search for the best burger in the city, magazines and websites kept hailing Island Burgers’ among the top.
But we were never overwhelmed. More on this to follow.
The sandwich: Duke’s Churasco from Island Burgers and Shakes, 51st and 9th in Manhattan.
The construction: A huge breast of blackened chicken with jack cheese and jalapenos on sliced sourdough bread.
I ordered mine with bacon even though bacon is not on the sandwich as the chef intended it. I figured, you know, why not? But when the sandwich showed up there was no bacon, and when I got the receipt I saw why. My waitress entered the sandwich into the computer and then hit the “without bacon” button instead of the “plus bacon” button, which shouldn’t have even applied in this situation since the sandwich doesn’t come with bacon, and probably just made some guy in the kitchen shrug and be all, “huh, guess this guy really doesn’t want bacon.” Oh, how wrong you are, some guy in the kitchen!
If I open a restaurant there won’t even be a “without bacon” button on the computer, since all we’ll be serving is big plates of bacon anyway. Also, if we only have one dish we probably don’t need a computer.
Important background information: I feel like Island Burgers and Shakes benefits from the Jeff Francoeur effect a bit. A lot of Mets fans accused the media of consciously protecting Francoeur because he’s a nice guy and a good quote, but I don’t think it was nearly that nefarious. When those things happen — and they happen all the time, everywhere — I don’t think people necessarily recognize what they’re doing. I think members of the media grow to really, genuinely like Francoeur because he’s a nice guy and a good quote, and so they look for all the ways in which he’s helping the team win because in their heads they want him to be helping the team win because they are subconsciously biased toward him. And so, it’s easy — he’s got an amazing arm, he’s athletic, he’s well-liked in the clubhouse, and on the rare occasion he gets a hold of one, whoa nelly.
The people at Island Burgers and Shakes are all exceptionally friendly. Plus they play great music, it’s clean and brightly decorated with surfer-themed memorabilia without feeling like it’s trying too hard, and it’s a Hell’s Kitchen staple. Oh, and you can smell their burgers from about a block away. This is a place that any reasonable burger and sandwich enthusiast would want very badly to excel in its art.
What it looks like:
How it tastes: Spicy.
Mostly just spicy. I like spicy, don’t get me wrong, and the Duke’s Churasco is a very pleasant variety of spicy — the blackened, Cajun brand that really clears out your nostrils.
And every element of this sandwich is good. The chicken breast was moist, well-seasoned and obviously fresh. The jalapenos, though spare, added more spice and some nice crunch. The sourdough was soft and tasty. The jack cheese added a creamy texture, though the flavor was a bit overpowered by the overwhelming spice from the chicken and jalapenos.
But I wanted something more. The Grub Street list I keep coming back to put this sandwich as 15th best in all of New York, and with that type of reputation I would hope for something a little less one-dimensional. There were pickles on the plate so I added those and some ketchup before plowing into the second half of the thing, and while they added some nice elements, by then I wasn’t tasting much anyway. A lot of spice on this thing, fellas.
What it’s worth: That’s the other thing. This sandwich cost $10.75. Throw in a soda and a tip and I wound up paying $18 for lunch. That’s three breaded steak sandwiches from Ricobene’s! Dammit, Ted, you promised you wouldn’t let it get to you. That’s why you came to this familiar place, remember? You’re back in Midtown now, and you’re going to pay more for sandwiches; that’s just how it is. You have to let Ricobene’s go or it will ruin you.
The rating: 74 out of 100. Calling this the Jeff Francoeur of sandwiches would be unfair; this sandwich is, despite its shortcomings, way above replacement-level and indeed still pretty good. That said, it is a bit overrated and overpriced, perhaps oversold due to some nebulous intangibles. I’m struggling to come up with a good baseball-player comp for this one. I want to say Ryan Howard but I think he’s better than a 74 in this weird, haphazard and totally arbitrary rating system. Like a poor man’s Ryan Howard of sandwiches, only spicier.
Actually the gold sprinkles are relatively cheap. What makes it so expensive is that white truffle cheese, which itself cost £92 to make.
Blunos used a £5 loaf of sourdough dressed with extra virgin olive oil and then layered cheese, slices of quail egg, tomato, apple and fresh figs. He added dainty mustard red frills, pea shoots and the herb red amaranth for a salad layer and topped the whole masterpiece with edible gold dust.
– Steven Morris, Guardian.co.uk.
Wait, so you’re telling me I’m going to pay the equivalent of $170 for a sandwich and there’s not even going to be any meat on there? Look, I’m sure that white truffle cheese is plenty tasty — wait, actually, no, I’m not sure that white truffle cheese is plenty tasty. Who wants white truffle cheese? I’m about cheddar or jack, a nice hearty cheese.
And I’m sorry, figs aren’t any good. Fig Newtons are delicious but figs themselves are too sweet. We have a fig tree in my backyard and it yields billions of figs. And every day my wife’s all, “you’ve got to eat some of these figs, we’ve got so many,” but sorry, they’re gross. If I wanted candy, I’d plunge into that huge bag of Nerds and Now and Laters we’ve got in the pantry for some reason. And neither those nor the figs are appropriate to be anywhere near my sandwich.
Quail eggs and edible gold I’m fine with. I can abide a baller-ass sandwich even if I can’t afford one. Also, my compliments to the chef on his fine mustache:
Hat tip to commenter Andrew.
In-N-Out and Five Guys tie for the win. I’ve never been to three of the 18 places surveyed here — In-N-Out, Burgerville and Back Yard Burgers — but I’m mostly OK with the rankings until they get near the back end. Burger King is gross, and no one in his right mind could say it’s better than Jack In The Box, my former employer. Culver’s, ranked 6th, is excellent. One chain that didn’t make the list — Denver-area favorite Good Times — would probably crack the top 5 if it did.
“Where you are going — this is a good neighborhood?” the cabbie asked as we sped south, past the crush of skyscrapers, the chain stores giving way to empty storefronts, then empty lots.
“I don’t know, man. You tell me.”
“I don’t usually come so far south,” he said as we pulled up alongside a few concrete, cylindrical, vaguely Soviet apartment towers pocked with evenly placed circular windows.
This part of Chicago didn’t make the guidebook. Underbelly. A promising sign, perhaps. I didn’t come here for a tourist’s sandwich.
It’s not hard to spot Ricobene’s once you reach 26th st. Its glowing red neon sign hangs between a freeway overpass and Chinese live-poultry market, the squawking audible as you walk by. Across the street stands a massage parlor and a dive bar with a few happy-hour revelers huddled outside around cigarettes. Inside is a pleasant dining room, a clean well-lighted place brimming with nostalgia and black-and-white photographs, bursting with warm smells. An oasis.
The sandwich: Breaded steak from Ricobene’s, multiple locations in the Chicago area.
The construction: Thinly sliced steak, breaded and fried, on Italian bread with hot peppers, marinara sauce, mozzarella cheese and giardiniera — a type of pickled vegetable relish, here consisting of peppers, olives and celery.
The peppers and mozzarella cheese were optional. Obviously I opted for both. The woman asked if I wanted “hot or sweet.” I assume she was referring to the peppers. I went with hot.
Important background info: Cerrone faded by Sunday, sick with a sinus infection, but I still wanted to try more Chicago specialties. I settled on breaded steak because it was breaded steak, and Ricobene’s because it was open. The tip came via the excellent Jan and Michael Stern of the Road Food book series, which I could not recommend more heartily. Those people are heroes.
What it looks like:
(My apologies, this picture sucks)
How it tastes: You might know by now that I’m prone to hyperbole. But I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say the breaded steak sandwich from Ricobene’s is the pinnacle of human achievement.
Holy hell. Every single flavor I could want on a sandwich was on this sandwich. The beef was tender like veal, and the breading savory. The sauce was sweet and flavorful. The bread was sturdy enough to hold the thing together, but soft and delicious as well. The cheese was heaping, moist, cheesy. All those aspects added up to something like the best veal parmigiana hero I’ve ever had, and I’ve had a lot of veal parmigiana heroes. Some really, really good ones, too.
But what put this thing over the top were the giardiniera and hot peppers. The former added a tangy flavor, plus crunch from the celery. The latter set my mouth on fire, and amplified all the other amazing flavors in this sandwich.
The thing probably weighed about a pound and a half, but I wolfed it down, possessed.
When I finished, I stumbled out to the curb, dizzy and delirious. A couple of cops pulled up, and instinct told me to run — I felt like I had just done something illegal. I couldn’t, though. I couldn’t bring myself to leave the front of the restaurant.
I knew I had to leave Chicago the next morning, but I tried to consider ways I could have another breaded steak sandwich before I did. I thought about walking back in and ordering another right then even though the coma was already setting in.
Not knowing what else to do, I tweeted a few nonsensical things. Playing with my phone gave me an excuse to keep standing there.
It started raining. I kept standing there. I knew I probably looked like a crazy person. I didn’t care. I was a crazy person. I was standing outside a restaurant, right next to a live-poultry market and under the freeway overpass, in some odd area of a city I don’t know because I couldn’t tear myself away after eating an inconceivably good sandwich.
Finally I approached the crowd outside the bar. I wanted to accost them. I wanted to say, “good lord! What in hell are you doing at this bar, don’t you know what they’re serving across the street? Why are you wasting space on beer when that sandwich is available to you right there? You maniacs!”
But instead I collected myself and asked them where to find a cab. They pointed me to a depot down the block and I headed back to the hotel, forever changed.
What it’s worth: This sandwich cost like $6 or something. The cab rides were about $10 each way. This was easily worth $26, plus I’m always down for a sandwich adventure anyway. I could have taken the El train there, too, I just got lazy.
Hell, if I were working with a larger sample I’d say you should probably travel to Chicago for this sandwich, but since I’ve only had one I don’t want to send you packing on the possibility of an outlier. This was a sandwich worth traveling for, though.
The rating: 99 out of 100, and only because I’m not sure I’m willing to give out 100s. Best sandwich I’ve had in years, though, and since there’s no Chicago baseball player that makes for an appropriate comparison, I’m just going to have to go for it: The Michael Jordan of sandwiches.
I long ago said my piece about cheesesteaks. This thing is clearly Chitown’s answer to that sandwich, only, as you’ll see, there’s more to it than that. But there’s a baseball game going on so let’s cut the nonsense and get at it.
The sandwich: “The Regular Al” from Al’s Beef, several locations in Chicago.
The construction: Thinly sliced, Italian-seasoned beef on a soft Italian hero roll with giardiniera — a spicy pepper relish — provolone and sweet peppers, all dipped in the gravy in which the beef was stewing. Marinara was listed on the menu board and I ordered one “with everything” because I didn’t know how else to play it, but if I got red sauce on mine it wasn’t enough to notice.
Important background information: I can’t figure out why Chicago has such tall buildings. Manhattan makes perfect sense — it couldn’t spread out anymore, so it went up. In Chicago, you walk past these huge skyscrapers, and then like right down the block there’s adequate parking and restaurants with drive-thru windows and gas stations. What’s that about? Based on the map and its proximity to our hotel, Al’s Beef should have been a hole in the wall in a row of stores. But it stood alone, with a parking lot and some outdoor tables and a drive-thru. Right in the middle of a city with all these massive, massive buildings.
I mean, don’t get me wrong: I’m for it. If I had my druthers, I’d replace my tiny house with a 110-story superstructure in the middle of suburban Westchester just for the sake of awesomeism. But often building codes and market forces prevent people from doing stuff like that, and it seems weird to just keep going skyward when there’s ample parking about and all. I don’t know. I still have a lot to learn about Chicago. One sandwich at a time.
What it looks like:
How it tastes: Good. Spicy. Beefy. Like oregano.
It’s definitely an improvement on the regularly Philadelphia cheesesteak. I need to make that much clear. The seasoning of the beef might be a little heavy on the oregano, even, but it’s tasty nonetheless, and there’s way more going on here than just cheese and meat. Not that there’s anything wrong with cheese and meat but those are lilies appropriate for gilding. Actually to be perfectly honest, the cheese kind of got lost in the mix. But whatever, the rest of the mix was good enough to make up for the lack of cheese flavor. Unlike Philly’s offering, where the cheese flavor is the only flavor.
The giardiniera is great — a nice spicy peppery kick to go with the sweetness from the roasted peppers. And dipping the whole thing in the gravy worked well to keep the whole thing juicy. I was concerned that it would make the bread soggy and the sandwich mushy and hard to handle, but it withstood the pressure somehow. Just a wet-tish sandwich is all. And a good one.
But I’ll say it was lacking a certain depth of flavor I wanted to put the thing over the top into true sandwich magnificence. I think “spicy oregano bomb” is a fine treat, it’s just not something I’m nominating to the sandwich Hall of Fame anytime soon. I added a little ketchup, which sweetened the affair and helped a bit, but it was not enough to make anything explode with awesomeness in my mouth like previous sandwiches I have loved.
I will add, though, that for a sandwich that appears so unhealthy, I found the Regular Al surprisingly digestible. Cerrone and I walked the mile back to our hotel after eating, and I didn’t at all endure the greasy feeling I normally expect after eating a giant beefy sandwich. So good for you, Al. I think that signifies quality ingredients. Or maybe I’ve just developed an iron stomach.
What it’s worth: I can’t remember exactly what I paid for the Regular Al, which is as good a way as any to know it was real inexpensive. Like $6 maybe? Plus we walked about a mile there and back, like I said, but that seemed as good a way as any to explore the city and wasn’t much of an investment. So it was absolutely worth that, and I’d probably recommend checking it out if you’re in Chicago. Actually, if you asked me for advice — and I hope you might on these matters — I’d tell you to get an Italian beef sandwich from Al’s instead of bothering with the whole deep-dish pizza and the hours of investment that go into it.
Oh because that’s the other thing! We walked right up to the counter and ordered at Al’s, even though it’s supposedly over 70 years old, famous, and a bunch of magazines say it serves one of the best sandwiches in America. It is a terrifying indictment of humanity that the line wraps around the block at Pat’s King of Steaks in Philly, where they treat you like crap and serve you overpriced Steak-Um with Cheez Whiz, and there was no wait at all at Al’s.
The rating: 84 out of 100. A very good, but not exceptional sandwich. At times I thought it might be more, at times I thought it might be less, but it was definitely an above average sandwich that has been putting in solid work in the Second City for a long time now. The Ryan Dempster of sandwiches.
I got a hot dog here at Wrigley and I forgot to take a picture of it. So here’s some video that’s a bit out of context but that contains footage of the wiener in question:
Pretty excellent hot dog, actually. I was unimpressed with the ballpark food the last time I was here and have always heard it was nothing special — which is pretty much understood when you’re at an old park like this one.
But the hot dog itself was tasty and sweet, not sweet like “sweet, man,” but actually sweet to the taste. Which, I guess, is why the guy said I shouldn’t put ketchup on it. Plus I liked the customizable nature of the thing, with the relish and hot peppers and all.
I liked the poppy-seed bun, too, though it was a touch chewier than I would have liked. Obviously you can’t expect the Shack-ago Dog from every hot dog you try in actual Chicago, but this was a decent estimation, especially considering it came at a rusty old ballpark.
I imagine I’ll do better when I get to The Wiener’s Circle everyone keeps raving about.
We’ve all heard Judge Potter Stewart’s famous quote about porno so I won’t bother recounting it here. And if that man can subjectively, definitively identify pornography, so I can with pizza.
Matt Cerrone says that pizza is anything that stacks sauce, cheese, and, optionally, toppings on top of dough and calls itself “pizza.” Matt Cerrone lies. I’ve encountered plenty of things that vaguely fit that description call themselves pizza that are certainly not pizza, and probably at least one thing that calls itself something else that I might classify as a type of pizza — Flammekueche in Strasbourg, France.
So what’s the best way to know what is pizza and what isn’t? There’s only one way to be certain: Ask me. I know. Just trust me on this one, and be willing to defer to my pizza judgment.
If you eat something and you think it might be pizza, bring it to me. I will let you know.
But I can tell you this much right now. What I ate last night at Gino’s East here in Chicago was not pizza:
Which is not to say it wasn’t delicious, mind you. Because it was. I mean, hell, it featured sweet, delicious tomato sauce, a big, whole sausage patty and some scant mozzarella cheese on a cornmeal crust. Cornmeal! I mean it was like a giant pizza made on cornbread. And cornbread is awesome.
But note that I said it was like a giant pizza made on cornbread. Because pizza is not like this. This was like some sort of cake with pizza-related substances on top. Actually, this was like an actual pie of pizza things. Not a pizza pie, because that’s what we call real pizza. This was a pie inspired by pizza. Tasty, don’t get me wrong. I can’t stress that enough.
It was good last night and it was good again when I had the leftovers this morning for breakfast. But at no point along the way was it something I’d call pizza. If you blindfolded me and fed me it, I’d be all, “thanks for this delicious treat,” but not, “thanks for shoving that pizza in my mouth.”
The other thing is it takes 45 minutes to prepare. That’s nuts. I was fine with it because the waiter at Gino’s East told us it was going to take that long and we understood, but I can’t think of anything in New York you wait 45 minutes for once you’ve ordered it. One time when I was six, my mom and I waited 45 minutes at Friendly’s because the waitress forgot about us. But that’s pretty much it. There’s got to be a better system, especially at a place with as much traffic as Gino’s East had last night.
Chicagoans really just sign up to wait 45 minutes for pizza every time they order it? That means if they get it delivered it has to take at least an hour, right? That’s lunacy. Reminds me of an old Mitch Hedberg joke: “I like baked potatoes. I don’t have a microwave oven, and it takes forever to bake a potato in a conventional oven. Sometimes I’ll just throw one in there, even if I don’t want one, because by the time it’s done, who knows?”
But then these people still come out to the park every day even though their baseball team hasn’t won in a damn century, so maybe this city has a patience a lifelong New Yorker can’t understand.
Finally, I regret to inform you that Sandwich of the Week will be delayed until tomorrow or Monday for this week, depending on my schedule here in Chicago. Busy here. I meant to find a sandwich last night but we figured it would be a good time to get the eating of the “pizza” out of the way.
Tedquarters 