Look, the blogger-reader relationship is relatively simple: I give you something to read when you’re bored at work, and you stroke my ego by actually paying attention to my nonsensical blather.
But I do a lot for you. I do. You think these sandwiches eat themselves? C’mon. Eating tons of delicious sandwiches is a burden I bear for your benefit. And it’s not as easy as it sounds: Eating the sandwiches is a breeze, but finding a different sandwich to write about every week is a challenge.
A stunning confession: Sometimes, the Sandwich of the Week is not a sandwich I ate that week. Often — as will be the case this weekend — it’s a sandwich I ate a week or two earlier. And with the baseball season over and my workload at the studio lightened, I’ve had some more time to identify and devour interesting local sandwiches.
That creates a sort-of bottleneck situation: If there can be only one Sandwich of the Week, then I compile a backlog of sandwiches, and by the time I get to writing about them I struggle to remember all the details.
I also don’t do well with structure. Sometimes I don’t want to wait for the weekend and don’t want to bother with the rigid and completely arbitrary formatting demanded by Sandwich of the Week, with proper ratings and all that.
Sometimes I just want to write about sandwiches. That’s what follows here. As part of our blogger-reader relationship, you’ll just have to indulge me.
Following food trucks on Twitter is reasonably fascinating. First off, you get to see where they’re going and if they’re going to be reasonably near your workplace. Second, you learn that operating a food truck or cart in New York City essentially means perpetually jockeying with other vendors for prime placement and a constant struggle with law enforcement. The latter is something the Vendys organizers talked about a lot. But I guess I didn’t recognize just how big a problem it is for the vendors until I saw all the evidence on Twitter: street-meat heroes forced to pick up and move in the middle of what should be the lunch rush.
And it’s hard to fault the cops. If you’re selling schnitzel on the street, you’re going to create a pretty good deal of foot traffic, and thousands of vendors operating unchecked in this ridiculously populous borough could bring about chaos. Meaty, delicious chaos.
I’m honestly not sure how the permit system works for street carts and food trucks, and where they are and are not allowed to operate. But while I was waiting on my sandwich at the Etravanganza stand on 52nd and Park, a cop came along and said something to the cart’s owner, who then asked the officer if he could just finish my sandwich before he packed up. Thankfully, the policeman obliged and walked away. Then the man in the cart said to me:
“This is every day. My dream is to open my own restaurant.”
I stepped back to examine the cart and noticed that it pretty clearly started as one of those coffee-and-donut breakfast stands. There were donuts and muffins in a plexiglass case, surrounded by signs advertising tacos, sandwiches, breakfast burritos, daily specials.
I don’t know for sure, but it seemed to me that this guy was creative and enterprising enough to take his humble breakfast cart to its logical extremes, using it to cook interesting foodstuffs and extend his business into lunchtime. So if I had to guess, I’d bet the cop was moving him along because he didn’t have the permit to sell so deep into the afternoon — it was already 2 p.m.
The cop was likely doing his job, then. But if I am choosing sides in a conflict, I will 100% of the time sympathize with the one serving me pork at a reasonable rate.
Which brings me, at long last, to the sandwich: Grilled cheese with bacon, chorizo and jalapenos on whole wheat bread. It looked like this:
So how was it? How do you think? It was a grilled-cheese sandwich with bacon, chorizo and jalapeno. All those things are awesome. As was this sandwich.
Despite all the additions, it was still, at its heart, a grilled-cheese sandwich. None of the fillings overwhelmed the buttery grilled bread or the molten American cheese inside.
(On American cheese, briefly: A lot of uppity food lovers often judge the hell out of American cheese, and I get it, I guess. It’s obviously not the best cheese or even a good cheese. Kraft singles are pretty much the definition of replacement level for cheese. But to me, grilled cheese is best with American. Yes, it’s processed, unnatural and unhealthy. Whatever, so are many delicious foods. And in this case I’m sandwiching it between two slices of bread practically slathered in butter)
The jalapeno and chorizo added a nice bit of spice — something I had somehow never considered might benefit a grilled cheese. Actually, I’m kind of baffled that I never thought to add sausage to a grilled cheese on my own, so massive kudos go to the cart’s owner for his ingenuity.
The bacon, I suppose, could have stood to be just a little more crispy, but that’s really nitpicking. For a $5 sandwich constructed under obvious time constraints, this was excellent.
But I imagine there are teams that have been helped — if only slightly — toward a championship by their managers and teams that have won championships only in spite of their managers, so it obviously behooves the Mets to make the optimal choice.
Tedquarters 