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This is how the sandwich blog ends—with far too many words.

Clearly we lost our mo there in the dog days of Summer of Sandwich. The Mets … losing. The virus … spreading. The forests … burning. And yet we’re back at work, sweating ponds into our face masks, doing our best to pretend things are reasonable.

So many sandwiches! We ate, by our count, 70+ different sandwiches this summer. We made great progress on something we didn’t foresee emerging from this light-hearted project: the Unified Sandwich Theory©.  We had grand plans in the final weeks of our project—to revisit some of our summer greatest hits and to hit up Europane, one of our all-time faves.

We did a little of the former, none of the latter. Whimper, whimper, nary a bang.

Revisit #1: Saturday August 21: Crème

Why go back to Crème? On Saturdays, Crème offers a sandwich they don’t offer any other day of the week: a BLAT … except, being too clever by half, they swap out the tomato for turkey, use sliced sourdough, and give it a swipe of mayonnaise or aioli though they don’t list this on the menu description. (Ahem: Your sandwich should match your menu description.) We also got their Saucisson Sec, served on a baguette. This was good … but why the hell don’t delis put cornichons on baguettes correctly? What is up with the mad center-piling?

Crème is good. Their baguettes are solid. The ingredients are fantastic (a quick way to tell sandwich quality: sneak a little taste of each part of the filling on its own. If it’s amazing, great. If it’s not, well, there you go). The salami is excellent, the turkey spot-on, the cheeses very well done.

• Overall Balance/Taste: +1 points
• Quality of Ingredients: +1
• Bread: +1
• Integrity:
• X-factor: so close!: +1

Overall: +4 points, or a perfectly tasty Pat’s Philly Cheesesteak

Revisit #2: Thursday August 26: Tortas Sinaloa

WTF?! They were out of avocado!

That’s cool, we can roll. We were excited to get back to Tortas Sinaloa, and we weren’t disappointed, at least not much. We got: the carnitas, frijoles, and queso panela. We also got: the carne asada, frijoles, and queso Oaxaca—with this we got the panela instead, unfortunately. Panela isn’t our favorite torta cheese (sorry, Guadalupe)—it has this squeaky thing going on and it doesn’t full melt-meld with the rest of the sandwich. Small complaint. The telera rolls at Tortas Sinaloa are fantastic—telera rolls might be our favorite sandwich roll. They have great flavor but sadly got a little steamed in the drive home, which cost a little texture, and leads to our newest addition to the Unified Sandwich Theory©: cold sandwiches are better than hot sandwiches because they travel well—hot sandwiches should generally eaten immediately.

That aside: Tortas Sinaloa is damn good. These are immense tortas. The meats are legit: the carnitas are fantastic, the carne asada is almost as good. Their bean-meat-cheese ratio is dead on and, impressively for tortas, these sandwiches hold together. Do we have a lingering unease regarding tortas—yes we do…because, well, we would rather eat these as burritos or tacos, as the latter two are so much more salsa-friendly.

For what is a torta but a too-thick taco with too little salsa?

• Overall Balance/Taste: +2 points
• Quality of Ingredients: +1
• Bread: +1
• Integrity:
• X-factor: no avocado!: -1

Overall: +3 points, or a perfectly tasty Pat’s Philly Cheesesteak

Revisits #3 & #4: Saturday August 28: Padua & Claro’s

We were thrilled to go back to Padua Pasta Makers—after all, it provided one of our favorite sandwiches of the summer, a simple mortadella and cheese. This time we thought we’d let them stretch their creative legs and ordered the Padua Special—basically their version of an Italian grinder.

Sadly, this was a little overwrought. The bread at Padua is as good a bread as we’ve had this summer—firm, crunchy outer texture; soft inner texture; the earthiness of the wheat. But the meats don’t hold up. Padua doesn’t use Boar’s Head, which is not an automatic sin—neither does Roma—but alone, the salami, capicola, and even the mortadella are all a little disappointing. The sandwich even lost a bit of integrity. See that meat-to-bread ratio? No go: a sandwich shouldn’t be screaming meat-meat-meat. A good sandwich is a reasonable blend, a fine balance. Not this guy.

• Overall Balance/Taste: +1 points
• Quality of Ingredients: +0
• Bread: +1
• Integrity:
• X-factor: second-time let-down: -1

Overall: +1 points, or a standard PB&J

Our first visit to Claro’s was great. Our second–also good, and, better, it brought about a new addition to the Unified Sandwich Theory—more on that in a moment.

First: holy shit: Claro’s is popular. We called at 11am on a Saturday morning to order a sandwich for pickup. Keep in mind: this is a sandwich shop/Italian market in Upland we’re talking about, San Bernardino County, Upland, the land where sandwich shoppes abound.

We were on hold five minutes.

Then someone from the deli came on and took our order.

Then he said it’d be ready.

In an hour.

?

??

???

We pouted about this—we had our revisit plan! Then we stopped pouting and sucked it up. We stopped at the aforementioned Padua (15 minutes!), picked up the Special, ate it on the very same downtown Upland bench upon which we had our first Padua sandwiches, and, by the time we’d finished and driven over to Claro’s, fifty minutes had passed. We parked, walked in, and … really: holy shit: Claro’s is popular. The place was packed with people waiting to order sandwiches, picking up sandwiches, sandwiches, sandwiches, sandwiches. Apparently the people of Upland love a Claro’s sandwich at noon on Saturday. Good to know.

Finally after waiting in line with quite a few anti-maskers, yay, we walked out, Grandpa Frank in hand. We took Grandpa Frank home. We sat Grandpa Frank in the fridge. Did Grandpa Frank complain? Hush, Grandpa Frank. We did weekend homework, read through potential prose manuscripts, applied for residencies, planning classes, picked up wine-club wine, almost got run over walking through downtown La Verne, and watched the Mets lose again. Normal Saturday stuff.

At 4:30pm, we turned on Angels & Demons because earlier this summer we watched The Da Vinci Code. Not a good reason. These movies are at best half-amusing if you’re half-paying attention and, you know, writing about sandwiches. Halfway through the film, we took Grandpa Frank out of the fridge and dug in.

Grandpa Frank features Claro’s baked ham, capocolla (regular, not hot), lean Toscano (a Tuscan salami known for being lean and heavily black-peppered), provolone, roasted red peppers, and Italian dressing. Two small criticisms: the roasted red pepper was a little on the thick side, making its slimy texture overly pronounced, and the provolone was especially provolone-y: a bit too much must and stink. That aside: this was a very, very good sandwich. The in-house baked bread was even better than Padua’s—a little more forgiving crust while retaining total integrity. The three proteins were a bit scaled back from the ample amounts found on the Padua grinder—closer to Roma Market’s magic ratio. The ham was especially good, and we had a heat coming from … somewhere. The dressing? It wasn’t the meats. But this sandwich had total meld, as did our previous Claro’s offering, the Angry Joe or whatever goofy family name it has (I mean, I know Claro’s has five locations…but we can get ten sandwiches with roads everyone knows? The Foothill? The Orange Grove?)

• Overall Balance/Taste: +2 points
• Quality of Ingredients: +1
• Bread: +1
• Integrity:
• X-factor: the wait: -1

Overall: +3 points, or a perfectly tasty Pat’s Philly Cheesesteak

… and thus ends our sandwich homily.

…

…

…

…almost.

Some final final thoughts:

Finishing the Grandpa Frank helped us arrive at another addition to the Unified Sandwich Theory©—not something deeply enlightening in the way of, say, the Illuminati stealing anti-matter from the Large Hadron Collider in order to immolate the Vatican (Angels & Demons is awful), but fairly logical: You want a sandwich you can’t easily make at home. If it’s easy to create a home-made sandwich comparable to your local shop’s offerings, why get a sandwich from your local shop?

Point being: while a good sandwich shouldn’t be fussy, it also shouldn’t be too simple (looking at you, jambon beurre from Crème).

And more: a sandwich should be local—it should feel of the place it was created. A small thing to ask.

Most important, maybe: a sandwich is meant to be simple. It is unfussy, undemanding, a convenience—a not-quite-elegant accompaniment, certainly not an occasion in and of itself. It is a sum of its parts, and those parts should meld—together they should taste of a piece. Apart? They should each still be, on their own, delicious. The bread should be good—fresh, somewhat crunchy exterior, soft interior. (A single roll is always better than slices.) The fillings should check those obvious taste boxes: a little bit of acid. A good salty-savory protein. A creaminess to match the salt and acidity. A little heat, if you want. Maybe a little veg earthiness, maybe a little crunch. That’s it.

And so, following the Unified Sandwich Theory, we give you the very best sandwich(es) we’ve had*: Roma Market’s The Sandwich and The Vegetarian Sandwich. Served on perfect Sicilian rolls, these each have less than five ingredients (not even shredded lettuce—raising their elegance). They aren’t easily replicated. The parts are delicious alone—together, they sing. They can travel. You can eat them in one hand. They are simple. They are delicious. They are perfect.

That’s it–that’s all we got. Now it’s your turn: go forth and find good sandwiches.

(*Well…Roma’s sandwiches are the very best…not counting the Terry Gross from Wax Paper Frogtown, which provided us by far our most complex and audacious sandwich we had all summer—and that proves the real final entry in the Unified Sandwich Theory©: there is no Unified Sandwich Theory©. There is just, in the end, good food. Be sure to eat it.)

August 15

Bay Cities Italian Deli and Bakery 1517 Lincoln Blvd, Santa Monica

Attari Sandwich Shop 1388 Westwood Blvd, Los Angeles

Jax, we’re coming over around two.

With Summer of Sandwiches.

Know what you want?

We’ll look it up during the drive.

Their website is confusing.

Why does that freeway sign say both “Drive Sober” and “Not Wrong Way”?

“Not Wrong Way”?

We’re supposed to get the tongue sandwich.

Don’t get me started about the brains.

They don’t have pictures of their menu.

What’s a kukusabzi?

Fresh herbs. Spices, eggs, salt & pepper – fried. Mustard, lettuce, tomato & pickles.

What’s a koobideh?

Minced beef, saffron, onions, spices, grilled basil, tomato & pickles only.

The bread is solid.

But these would be better without the bread.

Who wants fillings that are better without the bread?

Agreed, Jax and Kylie?

What? Don’t you even know all about koobideh?

This is Zach and he shoots things and wants to live until he’s 200.

Ricky really likes Stella. Who, like, like-likes Stella?

So that’s it, that’s the Godmother.

How is it, this so-called famous Godmother sandwich?

Would you say it’s overrated or underrated?

Perhaps appropriately rated?

Remember Sizemore in Point Break? My wife wants me to stay at Ramada!

And Tone Loc in Heat. All the way up it!

We should do a blog. A salad blog.

A Caesar salad blog.

Every picture would be the same.

You’d have to end at Caesar’s.

Sounds dangerous.

Better do it.

No, I know—chardonnay.

Ah, Summer of butter and oak.

Who even likes chardonnay?

Steve-O. Steve-O likes chardonnay.

I gotta say–I’m a little bummed we haven’t been named in the blog yet.

Oh. Oh my.

Everyone likes to be named.

Everyone loves it.

Everyone: Kylie Puckett and John Jackson have been on location for 3.5 post eatings.

“You should use portrait mode”—Kylie advice, weeks ago.

Thanks, Kylie!

At order.bcdeli.com, the prosciutto de Parma shows a caprese+prosciutto sandwich.

The sandwich doesn’t come with the caprese.

Oh well.

The color of that 4Runner is Lunar Rock not to be confused with Cement yes we have had much much time on our hands.

We keep sandwiches in ours.

The bread, for me, that’s the thing.

You like this bread? I love this bread.

This bread is merely fine.

and prosciutto, ham, capicola, mortadella, Genoa salami and provolone and yellow mustard and shredduce and tomatoes and pickles and onions and Italian dressing and peppers.

Salties: nine.

Acidics: four.

Jax likes prosciutto but he really likes chimichangas.

El Segundo is so cute. It’s the cutest city in the city. So cute!

Should we go to El Segundo?

Maybe in a second.

First—Well? Well?

Vastly overrated.

The Godmother

• Overall Balance/Taste: +0 points
• Quality of Ingredients: +1
• Bread: +1
• Integrity:
• X-factor: awful hype line: -1

Overall: +1 point, or a standard PB&J

Attari’s kukusabzi & koobideh

• Overall Balance/Taste: +1 points
• Quality of Ingredients: +1
• Bread:
• Integrity:
• X-factor: saffron!?: -1

Overall: +1 point, or a standard PB&J

(previous post here)

Upland German Deli

983 W Foothill Blvd, Upland

So we watched a movie called Phenomena the other night. Has anyone else seen this movie? THOUGHTS ARE WELCOME WE’RE A LITTLE TRAUMATIZED.

Here are some things that happen:

• Several times, houseflies save the heroine.
• A firefly helps her find a severed maggot-covered hand.
• A small child wields a two-part spear that twists together.
• There are no transitions.
• There is a chimpanzee named Inga.
• One decapitation is done by a piece of sheet metal.
• The boarding school girls and teachers are really mean.
• Motorhead did the soundtrack.

Moving along, moving in fact all the way to where we live, out here in Pomona Valley, nestled between the San Gabriel Valley and the Inland Empire. This is an oversimplification, but the towns around us generally have a type of cuisine that they do better than the other towns. Pomona has legit tacos. Claremont, overpriced food. La Verne/San Dimas/Glendora: diner food and Americanized Mexican. Montclair has Costco. And Upland has sandwiches.

Four times we’ve trekked over to Upland to add another notch on our Summer of Sandwich rapidly expanding belt, and each trip has been mostly commendable, and sometimes entirely fantastic. Today we went to the Upland German Deli, our second German deli of the summer—and certainly our favorite. While it’s no Italian market, they have German magazines, various strange German foods (a lot of mustard, pickles, and pickled fish), in-house baked rye breads, a variety of pretty good-looking pastries (Black Forest Cake, sacher torte, an enormous arm of strudel), and sandwiches: some standard American combinations, bratwursts, reubens, beef dips, schnitzels, liverwurst, and more.

The meats are Boar’s Head, and the ingredients and French (German?) rolls are nicely crusty on their exterior while remaining perfectly soft within. We planned to get two sandwiches, then we saw the sandwich a guy ahead of us ordered. So we only got one sandwich, the Grinder ($750)—here’s why:

Quick sandwich rundown: obviously that provolone cheese was not provolone, it was a bad bland Swiss, and the lettuce wasn’t shredded…but those are the only two strikes we have. The roll, as mentioned, was dead-on–not the most flavorful on its own, but the texture any good sandwich should have (it’d be great as a dip). The meats were a fantastically spiced salami, very good ham, and very good turkey. The addition of both a balsamic Italian vinegar and pickled jalapenos (just enough for a slow background burn) made this sandwich slightly unique and, overall, very good. And for $7.50? One of the best deals we’ve had, too. (We didn’t get the potato salad. If you’ve been reading this, you know why.)

Was this one of the best sandwiches we’ve had this summer? No, not really. But as a perfect representative of our still-in-progress Unified Sandwich Theory©, we fully endorse the simple goodness of the Upland German Deli’s Grinder, and we look forward to going back to trying some of their other offerings.

• Overall Balance/Taste: +1 point
• Quality of Ingredients: +1
• Bread: +1
• Integrity:
• X-factor: twins!!!: +1

Overall: +4 points, or a perfectly tasty Pat’s Philly Cheesesteak (wit)

(Previous post here. And coming up–we’re headed west! We’ve got tongue and Godmama in our sights!!)

a belated Summer of Sandwich guest post by Vieve: Poppy Cake Baking Co.

328 W Sierra Madre Blvd.,  Sierra Madre  https://poppycakebakingcompany.com/

My writing group in Pasadena has a regular bring-your-own lunch meeting, so in honor of Summer of Sandwiches I took July’s meeting as an opportunity to try out a new-to-me sandwich shop: Poppy Cake Baking Company. I called ahead to their Sierra Madre location and let them know 1) I’d like to pick up a to go sandwich in an hour and 2) I was vacillating between the Turkey Cranberry and the Chicken Pesto. The Turkey Cranberry ($9.50) sounded like kind of a lot of ingredients (“Roasted free range turkey breast, soft brie, cranberry relish, dijon aioli, romaine lettuce, tomato,” per their website https://poppycakebakingcompany.com/sierra-madre/ ) but it turns out I can’t say no to cranberry relish, especially with the recommended Rosemary Lemon bread, so I went with it. They kindly told me they’d wait about 45 minutes before assembling my sandwich, so it’d be fresh when I got there. Nice!

I pulled up to Poppy Cake an hour later; Poppy Cake was popping! Customers—and the smell of fresh bread—were everywhere. Since I’d ordered ahead, I went straight to the pickup line where my sandwich was wrapped up and waiting. Fast forward ten minutes and a few blocks, and I was ready to eat (with my only slightly befuddled friends who wanted to know: why are you taking a picture of your sandwich?). The Rosemary Lemon bread was pleasantly subtle (unlike the rather overly rosemaryish bread at The Brick https://anotherseanbernard.com/june-13-16-17-claros-tortas-sinaloa-the-brick/ ), the free-range turkey tasted well cared for, and the aioli and the cranberry flavors were surprisingly complementary. My only tiny complaint: the brie could have been more evenly distributed. I think it would have also been just as good (maybe better?) without the tomato, but even with the tomato the Poppy Cake Turkey Cranberry stays below our 7-ingredients-max mantra. Overall, this sandwich was a win: it felt wholly of a piece in a way that some of our other summer sandwiches hadn’t achieved. Will I take Sean there someday? Yes!

Turkey Cranberry

• Overall Balance/Taste: +1 point
• Quality of Ingredients: +1
• Bread: +1
• Integrity: 0
• X-factor: Successful Solo Sandwich Adventure +1

Overall: 4 points! Or: Vieve is a sucker for good Turkey Cranberry sandwiches

(Previous post here.)

Not quite Dip Week!©

Simply because we ended the Dip Week!© portion of Summer of Sandwich in Chinatown, this is a lead-in entry: while in Chinatown, we ended up getting three sandwiches from three distinct sandwich places, with only one being of the dipped variety.

Q: Why did we get three (!) sandwiches in Chinatown?
A: Ask Jake.

Also, on the recent recommendation of a poet friend, I’ve been flipping through Borges stories for the first time in years (and, too, Barry Hannah—not a recommendation, to be clear; I got to go to my office for the first time in months and raided my at-work titles at half-random. Barry Hannah: doesn’t really stand up so far). Borges: wow, what a bizarre author. You know this. He rarely plots. He doesn’t develop character. Tone is muted. He rarely has action/sequenced events. Mostly he has bizarre situations and/or people talking (and referencing, and referencing, and referencing)—and, of course, thinking. All arranged in his strange little mental box-game-mazes. That’s not a criticism—Borges is cool. My relative liking of Borges stories has always had more to do with my mood than with the stories—they’re all basically good, and strange, and singular. While they reference other works and thinkers, they don’t really exist in stylistic conversation with other works. They are, on a prose level (I’m reading in translation), very tautly written, if not particularly musical. So…strange and unique…but maybe limited to your patience for revelation. (Revelation: it can get old fast.)

            My favorite of the week is a co-favorite: first, “Averroës’s  Search,” which takes us into an afternoon and evening with an 11^th century Spanish philosopher who gets into quasi-arguments with thoughtful friends about how metaphors, rather than becoming old and dusty, actually gather meaning over time, giving them depth and complexity…and then the story ends with a beautiful Nabokovian authorial turn inward that’s, to me, sort of breathtaking. (I’m one of those terrible writers who loves writing about writing.) Second co-fave: “The House of Asterion.” This story! It’s basically a first-person confessional from a thoughtful madman talking about being locked in his amazing mansion that every now and then people enter for unknown reasons. What does he do? Slaughters them, of course. There’s a twist at the end that I wish there weren’t, as it adds logic to the illogic and robs the singular bizarre strangeness of Asterion: the story becomes clear rather than imbalanced.

            Why do other people like Borges? I think this is a question we ought to consider more.

            (Thanks, Jared, though I know you’re not reading this.)

Okay then. Chinatown sandwiches, non-Dip Week!© edition:

Saturday August 7:

Katsu Sando, 736 N Broadway, Los Angeles

Little Jewel, 207 Ord St, Los Angeles

We didn’t really want to eat three sandwiches but we got stuck waiting in basically a sandwich hall featuring, along with Katsu Sando, the Chinatown location for Wax Paper—with different NPR personalities than Frogtown!—and L.A. Brisket, which has its sandwiches named for LA freeways (well done); they looked damn good, but we had a firm plan: a dip and a sando.

(Also: there’s a sandwich hall in Chinatown.)

In it, as we were waiting for our chicken katsu sando ($11.50), our newest entry into the chicken sandwich wars, we wondered: Where would we actually eat this thing? No tables or chairs in the sandwich hall, and we suspected that our next iconic dip stop would be flooded with breathers, so we didn’t want to eat there; there’s always the Far East Market, but we figured it, too, was overrun (with Howlin’ Rays lunatics; also, we miss Chego). After our sando was handed over, we walked toward our next stop, bag in hand, uncertain where we’d actually eat…and we passed another little sandwich place with six nicely shaded outdoor tables. We looked up at the name and recognized it because it’d been suggested to us all the way back in May by brother Josh. Yeah, good fortune! We decided to split up: I headed on to stop #2 to get our Dip Week!© entry and Vieve paused, ordering a sandwich at the fortuitous place, grabbing us a table, too.

This place: The Little Jewel of New Orleans. How great is a New Orleans sandwich shop in Chinatown? Very great! Little Jewel has on its menu, no joke, THIRTY-THREE po’ boys, from oyster and shrimp and chicken classics to oddities like the French Fry po’ boy and a double veggieburger po’ boy. Our first po’ boy of sandwich summer! We went with a classic, the Crescent City Fried Shrimp Po’ Boy ($14.99), with shredded cabbage, red onion, pickle, tomato, and hot sauce on a soft po’ boy roll (we went sans mayo). This thing was huge! (Half is still in our fridge. Hungry?)

Folx: po’ boys are sort of bomb—certainly, at least, the fried protein variety. The rest of the sandwich is classic American submarine, so if the bread is good enough, which Little Jewel’s is (po’ boy bread is intentionally softer than a French roll; something to do with the humidity of New Orleans and not being able to bake with wheat flour so much)—anyway, the bread and basic dressing all forms a perfectly reasonable base for any sub. Then, bang, fried shrimp. The batter on the Little Jewel shrimp was heavily spiced but not too heavily battered—which, to both, yes. And this fried shrimp brings something to the table we haven’t seen this summer: a beautiful crackling texture with every bite.

• Overall Balance/Taste: +1 point
• Quality of Ingredients: +1
• Bread: 0
• Integrity:
• X-factor: Po’ Boys!: +1

Overall: +3 points, or a perfectly tasty Pat’s Philly Cheesesteak (wit)

Admission: We actually ate our Katsu Sando (chicken) before the po’ boy. If you know sandwiches in LA, you know that Katsu is a pretty famous player in our sandwich scene. It’s a Japanese-styled chicken sandwich, katsu being a panko coating that’s supposed to (and does, here, very well) keep the protein juicy. A new sandwich place has to be strange, of course, and Katsu’s oddness is that its sandwiches are served on house-made milk-bread cut into Texas toast slices (Texas meaning: bigger). Otherwise, the sando has a pickled veg thing going on similar to what you find on other Asian-style chicken sandwiches (see Holdaak; see Bolo). And, too, the sauce that comes on the side, which they call OMG, meaning oh my gochujang…which here we are again getting into historical colonialism. Should the OMG sauce be served at the bottom of a well? And you fall into it, getting caught, peering up at a ring of light that might be existence and might be dread and might be both? Is someone stalking cats? Are you playing bingo? Sorry. Anyway: Katsu’s other oddness is that they don’t have a spicy version of their sandos, and that’s unfortunate, because sweet-leaning sandwiches seem to us a bit one-note, lacking the complexity that balances the sweetness; heat, after all, has the magical ability of making you urgently need to take the next bite—it’s saltwater for castaways. Drink me.

This was a good sandwich, to be clear. Just not our favorite in the chix category.

• Overall Balance/Taste: +1 point
• Quality of Ingredients: +1
• Bread: 0
• Integrity:
• X-factor: next door to the superior Wax Paper: -1

Overall: +1 points, or a standard PB&J

(Previous post here.)