The Lunch Encounter

Browsing for a sweepstakes? I can’t say priiiiciiiiisely what the stakes are, or what you might need to sweep ’em, but I can specify the basic parameters: two slices of bread.

Make That Sandwich Contest

Collage by the m(ighty)f(ine) bf

Somehow I failed to identify our era as the golden age of sandwiches. Not in so many words, that is. When I started this blog I had no idea that a tsandwich tsunami would roar in, bringing an onslaught of salumerias, bakeries, pickle makers, cheesemongers and a grilled cheese bonanza. And that is just a drop in the bucket, so to speak. Sandwich smackdowns are tossing contestants into trees and sub wars are dividing families.

Leave it to the NY Times to feature Advanced Sandwich Construction, Sandwich Evolution and the Sandwich Register. Thank you, Liz, for turning me on to this deep, deep well of sandwich history, lore and competition.

Golden Era is, to my buttery brain, the era when margarine was a foreign substance, and known as oleo. White, greasy, and revolting without guise. In those days, in Wisconsin, the dairy state, butter was golden, and regulations required that oleo be packaged with yellow color on the side. A housewife had to knead the color in on her own. Mmmm, skin so soft. We were a butter only household, and it went on the inside of every sandwich. When did we drop that and why? Those darn health and food scientists have lead us astray. Butter reigns again in two thousand and ten.

Trade in your vuvuzela for a sandwich.

Yes it does. Almost as dirty as if you had garnished it with a kumquat. On a frillpick.

Who can be found, when he is not hanging around The Lunch Encounter, at 8 Track Heaven.

Well, I’ll be dipped, Philippe the Original is featured on H.E. Doubletoothpicks Kitchen.

In this video you’ll see Hell’s Kitchen visit Phillipe’s “Original French Dipped Sandwich” shop in Los Angeles, then immediately afterward the contestants are challenged to make their own gourmet sandwiches. Very entertaining, sez MMSMSotMDL.
Watch Hell’s Kitchen

Vote for the best sandwich on the Huffington Post

I have a personal aversion to “best” anything. There is good, and there is better and there is superlative. At each layer there are often several strong contenders, or a slew. Each one good, better or superlative in its own way. A 43-way tie is fine by me.

This just in from Alacritous Chicago Correspondent Bottle Rocket(s) Fan Linda:

Like a cross between a Little Debbie and a cold Hot Pocket...

Hold on, I believe I see a lawsuit on the horizon. Just checking the date on this image. July 19, 2009. AHEM.

Conflict Kitchen is a take-out restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries with whom the US is in conflict.

Conflict Kitchen makes food, and serves food, and hopes you can eat it without choking.

Let’s see, with whom is the US in conflict? Well, let’s look in our own backyard. We are in conflict here. And now let’s look a little wider. Hey, what a surprise, we are in conflict with large parts of the globe. Let’s eat!!

Sopping it up with sangak, nan-e afghani, and pita, and washing

it down with doogh, chai, or a Tempo.

Who woulda thunk it, Subway has an executive chef. And he discusses “sandwich landscape.” I would say that landscape is more one of horizontality that verticality.

Where does an executive chef for an outfit like Subway come from? Did he/she go to Culinary school? What skill set is used for this sort of work? Cheffy type skills or otherwise? Is is a good job? Does he/she like it? Is this executive chef addressed as Chef? My former cheffy self is boggled by these questions. Cannot get into the head of a Subway executive chef head. My imagination is stymied.

Click here to read the story, in a font size that does not require magnifycality.

Thank you, Betty Bird!

Los Angeles Magazine

Lifted this whole cloth from the Times.

1888: Katz’s Delicatessen, now the city’s oldest deli, opens on the Lower East Side. The specialties then, as now, were hot meat sandwiches: corned beef, pastrami, brisket of beef.

1914: Arnold Reuben, owner of Reuben’s Restaurant and Delicatessen at 802 Park Avenue, prepares a sandwich of rye bread, Virginia ham, roast turkey, Swiss cheese, coleslaw, and Russian dressing for an actress. The Reuben is born.

19841922: Italian immigrant Nick Defonte opens his sandwich shop in Red Hook.

1930s: A lack of funding for large marketing campaigns during the Great Depression forces companies—and desperate job seekers—to resort to sandwich-board advertising.

1932: Chock Full o’Nuts stores, which previously sold just nuts, then just nuts and coffee, begin offering cream-cheese sandwiches on date bread. Owner William Black insists that employees use tongs instead of hands to prepare the food, and even goes so far as to install “Food Not Touched by Human Hands” signs throughout the Chock Cafes.

1937: Carnegie Deli opens across from Carnegie Hall in midtown. Average sandwich dimensions in 1937: two inches high and stuffed with a quarter pound of meat. Averag today: six inches, one pound of meat.

1965: The BMT, consisting of Genoa salami, pepperoni, and ham, and named for the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation, is added to Subway’s sandwich menu. The name is later modified to Biggest Meatiest Tastiest.

1982: Richard LaMotta starts selling Chipwich ice-cream sandwiches for $1 each through an army of 60 street-cart vendors. Before long LaMotta is selling 40,000 per day.

1982: Cantankerous, suspender-wearing sandwich-monger Kenny Shopsin opens Shopsin’s General Store in Greenwich Village.

1984: The Carnegie Deli provides the main setting for Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose. Owner Leo Steiner adds a Danny Rose special (corned beef, pastrami, and a side of coleslaw) to the menu.

1987: Tom Cat Bakery opens in a 1,300-square-foot garage in Long Island City. The company now has a 45,000-square-foot headquarters, employs 275 people, and provides the bread for sandwich chains like Hale and Hearty Soups.

1995: Gavin Kaysen, now the executive chef at Cafe Boulud, starts his culinary career slinging sandwiches at a Subway in Edina, Minnesota.

1990s: The artisanal-sandwich-bread craze hits a fever pitch: Amy’s Bread opens in 1992, withSullivan St Bakery following in 1994, and then Bouley and Balthazar Bakeries in 1997. The traditional choice of white, wheat, or rye bread is expanded to include options like seven-grain and focaccia, with or without seeds, egg wash, or onions.

1997: Chef Alain Coumont opens the first U.S. outpost of Belgian-based bakery chain Le Pain Quotidien on Madison Avenue. Tartines hit Manhattan.

1998: Jason Denton and his wife, Jennifer, open ’ino in a former West Village dog-grooming salon, kicking off a citywide panini frenzy.

1998: Peanut Butter & Co. opens in Greenwich Village with twelve different types of peanut-butter sandwiches. It’s the beginning of the ultra-sandwich-specialization craze (Grilled Cheese NYC and Say Cheese came later).

2003: Chefs Tom Colicchio and Sisha Ortuzar open ’wichcraft, an artisanal-sandwich chain inspired by the way chefs eat: standing in the kitchen at the end of the shift, starving, refashioning whatever’s left over from dinner into a sandwich.

2010: Restaurateur Danny Meyer opens Sandwiched, a pop-up café in the Whitney Museum of Artfeaturing highbrow sandwich creations from chefs Michael Anthony (Gramercy Tavern), Carmen Quagliata (Union Square Cafe), Floyd Cardoz (Tabla), Kenny Callaghan (Blue Smoke), and Robb Garceau (Hudson Yards).

2010: Lisa Cherkasky sees all of life as a metaphor for sandwich making. Or perhaps the other way around. And around and around. Stack, unstack, stack, unstack.

My personal time line is not a line, it goes around and around and around, open, close, open, close, fold, unfold, fold, unfold. Spent the weekend being a shut-in so as to be more open. Stopping time to make time. 

Take a little time and name these things. 1. What you fear. 2. What you are grateful for. 3. What you hope. Magically numbers 2 and 3 become larger, and 1 shrinks when named, but only when you STOP to note it. An emotional speed bump. Choose a number, any number. The barrel is unlocked and fully stocked.