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No we did not abandon the Summer of Sandwich! We were just slowed down: by travel to see family; by family who didn’t want to eat sandwiches quite as zealously as us; by travel to an area lacking in sandwiches; and by returning home with a family member who *really* didn’t want to eat sandwiches—rather, the interested party voiced a desire for Mexican food. We obliged and plowed through Sonoratown, Burritos La Palma, Guisados, Chichen Itza, and Cielito Lindo in like two days, leading to a quick trivia question:

• Q: What’s better, tacos or sandwiches?
• A: Tacos.
• Q: Always?
• A: Always.
• Q: So why are we still yapping about sandwiches?
• A: Simple. It’s the Summer of Sandwich.

July 21: TJ’s Subs

167 W Arrow Hwy, Glendora

Not great! TJ’s is an amazing little place down Arrow Highway—it’s cheerful just stepping inside with all the strange “art” (kids drawings, we think?), including quite a bit that’s Old Testament-themed. Hey, Modigliani! And sofas!

The sandwiches at TJs confirm two theories: that shredded lettuce + oil and vinegar is a very good (sandwich not taco) thing. And that quality ingredients make the day. We got the very cheap $5 TJ’s sub (ham, salami, mortadella, cheese, oil+vinegar+shredduce—and pickles!) and the almost as cheap turkey-bacon-avocado (look at that bacon!), same fixins. We wanted to like these sandwiches more … but no go. TJ’s! Not the best ingredients, friends! Low-quality meat and cheese = SADwiches. So it goes.

• Overall Balance/Taste: +0 points
• Quality of Ingredients: -1
• Bread: -1
• Integrity:
• X-factor: homey space: +1

Overall: -1 point, or a simple PB&J

July 22: Great Basin Bakery

275 S Main St, Bishop

WE WERE SO EXCITED TO GO TO GREAT BASIN BAKERY. We love this place— on the recommendation of a former Great Basin Bakery employee, it’s become our routine stopping point on our annualish treks up 395 (thanks, Emily!). The Cowgirl cookies: awesome. The toasted jalapeno-cheese bagel with cream cheese: amazing. The $9.45 Italian Veggie Spinach: we thought this had a firm lock for our top 3 vegetarian sandwiches of the summer, given how delicious it’d been in the past. It features tomatoes, pesto, provolone, pepperoncini, avocado, Italian dressing, and, of course, spinach. Served on your choice of sourdough and multigrain bread.

New addition to the Unified Sandwich Theory: sourdough >>>> multigrain.

Ugh, we choked. We totally forgot that we usually get the sourdough and instead got the multigrain, which was very, very nutty, very, very wheaty, and very, very grainy. It killed a usually amazing sandwich. We were sad. We are sad. We will be sad. (Plus now we’re wondering: maybe the Italian Veggie isn’t even that good? The Italian dressing is a bit much—I mean, there’s pesto! Why do both? Anyway we’ll check back next summer.) Thankfully, we also ordered the Mt. Tom Turkey, with turkey, lettuce, avocado, sun-dried tomatoes, and red onion … on, yes, sourdough. Much better. But eesh, everyone: let’s lose sun-dried tomatoes. Just vanquish them from the world. Can we agree on that? Please?

• Overall Balance/Taste: +0 points
• Quality of Ingredients: +1
• Bread: 0
• Integrity:
• X-factor: Bishop!: +1

Overall: +2 points, or a perfectly tasty Pat’s Philly Cheesesteak (wit)

July 24-25: various home-made subs

July 24/25: Reno & King’s Beach

We talked our family into buying a whole bunch of sandwich ingredients! Boar’s Head, at that! We all made our own sandwiches but this is a quick recap: we got: smoked turkey, honey turkey, salami, mortadella, havarti, cheddar, shredduce, oil+vinegar, chipotle mayo, mustard, mayo, avocado, sandwich pickle slices, pepperoncini, tomatoes from the garden, and rolls from the Safeway deli.

Takeaways:

• Don’t get rolls from the Safeway deli. (We ended up tearing most of the bland bread away to better pile on toppings.)
• Don’t go over seven ingredients.
• Really. Bread, meat, cheese, oil, vinegar, shredduce, maybe another thing (spice, pickle)…and that’s all you need.
• Everyone, without knowing it, loves mortadella. You do, too.

• Overall Balance/Taste: -1–>+2 points
• Quality of Ingredients: +1
• Bread: -1
• Integrity:
• X-factor: family!: +1

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

(Previous post here.)

Thursday July 8

The Heights Deli & Bottle Shop: 2927 N Broadway, Los Angeles (Lincoln Heights)

Gamboge: 1822 N. Broadway Ave., Los Angeles (Lincoln Heights)

It was friends’ week on Summer of Sandwich! First, on the recommendation of a friend and former colleague (thanks, Jolivette!), we decided to seek out Gamboge, a newish sandwich-ish place in Lincoln Heights (a great neighborhood just north of Chinatown, along the LA River). We went in search of our first num pang khmer (essentially a Cambodian banh mi). Better, we brought along one of our great food adventurer friends (hey, Jeremy!) … because friends are great for so many reasons (they let you use more parentheticals!), most especially being they help you to order even more sandwiches.

We found that near to Gamboge is the aptly named The Heights Deli & Bottle Shop. This place is fantastic. They have an insane amount of beers-by-the-can (I think they had, no kidding, over five hundred), plus the weekday-lunch-time-humming deli, and their own drinks including slushie Palomas and Sangria. I repeat: Slushie Palomas. The slushie machine was out, for shame, but the deli was rocking. The sandwiches are all named for local streets—really this should be mandated; it’s now officially included in the Unified Sandwich Theory©.

We got: a Philly Cheesesteak ($11.60; no street name!), the Daly St ($10.95), and the Lacy St ($10.95). The bread for all three was par: soft rolls with a flaky crust, almost like a Dutch crunch—maybe a bit too soft, really. To the sandwiches: the Lacy St caught all our eyes as it has an ingredient lineup we hadn’t seen before: fresh mozzarella, artichokes, roasted peppers, sundried tomatoes, and house sauce. This wasn’t my favorite sandwich—sundried tomatoes are, to me, one of the most aggressive ingredients in the world—but Vieve and Jeremy thought it was great, so ignore me. (The fresh mozzarella was exquisite.) I alone preferred the Daly St to the Lacy St: a very, very solid turkey sandwich, with “pitcraft smoked turkey breast (lol), lettuce, tomato, onion, pickle, mustard, cheddar cheese, house sauce.” The Daly St isn’t ground-breaking—but it’s very solid.

Surprisingly, the cheesesteak was the star of our show: roast beef, onions, bell peppers, jalapenos, mayo, cheese. The cheese was a pleasant complement versus being overwhelming, the downfall of many a cheesesteak, and the roast beef was fantastic—best we’ve had this summer. And, as Jeremy pointed out, having a fifty-fifty mix of traditional bell peppers and jalapenos is a very clever update to a classic sandwich, adding a bit more green and a lot more zing.

• Overall Balance/Taste: +1 points
• Quality of Ingredients: +2
• Bread:
• Integrity:
• X-factor: no slushie Palomas!: 0

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

Gamboge is a bit less familiar than The Heights, in terms of sandwich style, setting, and service. (You can read more about it in this great LA Eater article.) First, you walk up to a barely signed door beside a narrow breezeway, try the door, and the door is locked. But look: there’s a menu out on a sidewalk A-frame board. So you stand there a minute feeling like an idiot, looking at the menu, and wondering precisely what do to until a woman with dimensions similar to Olive Oyl opens a window and leans out and cheerily asks, Hello, honies, what would you all like to order and where do you want to eat it? From that point, things improve significantly: you order, pay, and walk down the breezeway to a lovely patio that’s a bit shocking to stumble upon in an otherwise very working-class neighborhood. (I wonder if Gamboge might play this up a little more—get a little more speakeasy feeling.)

We ordered three num pangs, the spicy pork ($11), the grilled lemongrass beef ($12), and the chicken ($10.50). All three come not on baguettes but on bolillo bread—still a sign of French colonization, though this time in a different hemisphere. Bolillo is a softer bread, and it’s fair to say that we all missed the toothsomeness of a good baguette. All three feature fresh cucumber (in fun lengthwise slices), Maggi mayo (wake up-o!), pate (sans with the chicken), pickled carrot and papaya slaw (which sounds great but we the papaya got lost, sadly), scallion oil, toasted shallots (which we didn’t see much evidence of), and cilantro.

Along with the bolillo texture and all the wet ingredients, these were all very soft sandwiches—far too soft. The chicken, which is “pulled poached” (lol), was the greatest offender—almost more like a chicken salad sandwich, even without the pate. The lemongrass beef, slices of skirt steak, was on its own delicious, but it got a bit lost in the pillowfest, and I think we all agreed that it would have been better featured on a plate of broken rice. The spicy pork shoulder was delicious—it had enough savory oomph to fight off (or work with?) the other ingredients in a tastier way. These are fine sandwiches, to be clear…but they’re no banh mi from our favorite place here in the SGV—and they’re more than double the price, at that.

Overall Balance/Taste: +0 points

• Quality of Ingredients: +1
• Bread: -1
• Integrity:
• X-factor: patio!: +1
• Overall: +1 points, or your standard PB&J

Saturday July 10: Wax Paper Frogtown

2902 Knox Ave Ste 100 Los Angeles

This is from Susie D. on Yelp: “A vegan option with seasonal veggies on a menu with everything named after NPR hosts from a spot run out of a shipping container on a corner in Frogtown by the LA River… is everything I could ever ask for from California *sigh*.”

Plus: kayaking in the LA River! Is! A Real Thing!

Unsurprisingly, we’ve gotten in the habit this Summer of Sandwich of scouting sandwich locations in areas we plan to be visiting for non-sandwich reasons (which exist). And a block away from our kayak river entry is Wax Paper Frogtown, a sandwich place which, as Susie D. has established, names their sandwiches after NPR hosts. It’s mostly national folks—Terry Gross, Kai Ryssdal, Audie Cornish (what a name for a sandwich!), and, locally, our own Larry Mantle. (Unrelated: we can’t stand Air Talk.)

Wax Paper, Frogtown edition (also a spot in Chinatown), is a bit of a trip. If you don’t know Frogtown, it’s an older neighborhood along the river—tiny roads that only sometimes allow two cars to pass, residencies spilling into businesses and vice versa, people wandering around both with extreme purpose and a total daze. It’s a nicely Los Angeleno neighborhood—a little hipster, very diverse, neighborhood pride—that maybe gets overlooked, which, also, maybe some Frogtowners prefer. (One local is apparently deadest against the kayaking outfits. We’re not sure why.)

First the kayaking: Really, you can do this. We did it! I think we went almost a couple miles downriver and only had to portage our kayaks once during the voyage. And this: we saw, no joke, ospreys, kingfishers, stilts, blue herons, and green herons. In the middle of LA. Were there occasional rapids? There were! Did we eat shit and fall off our kayaks? We did! Fun all around.

To Wax Paper: very happily, we got to meet up with a couple friends, one of whom we went to grad school with twenty years ago (and his great wife). We secured (pretty goddamn expensive) sandwiches. We—since Wax Paper really is run out of a shipping container and has no seating—set out a picnic blanket in a patchy piece of dirt, trying our best to avoid various dried out dog droppings. And talked about our friends’ imminent move to LA and their house-hunting search that led them to look at a 14-million-dollar place across the street from Sia. (They were there on a lark. We don’t know anyone with that much money.)

And we ate. The Ira Glass ($12): “avocado, cheddar, garlic aioli, sprouts, pickled + raw red onion, cucumber on Bub & Grandma’s seeded sourdough wheat.” This was a solid sandwich…the bread was outstanding, though the sprouts were a bit too prominent (and we like sprouts), and the sharpness of the (shredded, oddly) cheddar cheese somewhat overwhelmed the other ingredients’ mild flavors.

The Terry Gross ($15!!!), on the other hand, was a sandwich we’d happily sit in a room and be interrogated by for 45 minutes—has Adam Driver ever eaten one? He should! Terry comes at you with roast turkey, an out-of-this-world green chili aioli, jalapeño/cilantro/radish slaw, hominy (we saw no hominy), tomatillo vinaigrette (why not mix with the aioli?), and (again, shredded) pepper jack, this time on Bub & Grandma’s focaccia. The focaccia was the best bread we’ve had all summer. Hand’s down. Terry was a little messy—she tends to veer at times and gets just a little self-focused, but we love her for that. Still, this sandwich has definitely entered our upper echelon. Maybe not inner-inner ring, but it’s close. And definitely—wait for it—not gross. If you’re feeling tired or adventurous, if, uh-oh, you’re running out of breath, then go to Frogtown, where you will, oh, get stamina, and be, well, something like the greatest.

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

Overall: +5 points, or a perfectly tasty Pat’s Philly Cheesesteak (wit)

(Previous post here.)

116 Harvard Ave N, Claremont

Ah, Crème. Another sandwich place (bakery, really) that we were very excited to revisit when we hatched this wacky Summer of Sandwiches. Crème is simple, reliable, and delicious. It almost always has a line out the door, return customers seeking out great loaves of bread, gorgeous pastries, and impeccable sandwiches.

Today, we gorged. We got three sandwiches, eight bucks a pop: the Greens, the Turkey with Fontina, and the Jambon Beurre (that means—checking Google Translate—ham and butter). The Greens is the non-baguette representative, featuring a very damn good multigrain bread spotted with poppy seeds, we think, and delivering avocado, cucumbers, arugula, and an insanely savory vegan garlic aioli. The aioli is spread somewhat lightly, and while we usually respect a restrained sandwich, but this aioli is so good we’d probably shower in it, so the fine sandwich artists might consider going with a heavier hand? Or just selling pints of the stuff? Since we’re in rarefied sandwich air with Crème, we’re going to nitpick just a bit: the cucumber slices are cut a little large and could use seasoning (simple salt and pepper) before being added to the sandwich. But the Greens is very good as it is—very likely to be, along with The Vegetarian The Sandwich from Roma Market and a special guest star we’ll be seeing in a few weeks, one of our top three veggie sandwiches of the entire summer.

The Turkey with Fontina and Jambon Beurre both come on baguettes, of course…and you know, it’s really great to eat a good baguette. Crisp crust, soft innards, just a bit of resistance—a baguette is a little harder than softer breaded sandwiches, but it’s nice to have do a little work sometimes, maybe? The ingredients on both sandwiches are great—the turkey is top-notch, the fontina (while not quite as good a sandwich cheese as Havarti, says me) is serviceable, and the crisp romaine and light spread of Dijon get you feeling a little Frenchy…and that’s before you’ve even taken a bite of the Jambon Beurre. Once you’ve done that, you’re suddenly wandering the Champs-Élysées and humming Edith Piaf. Because: the bread. The ham. And, my gosh, the butter (we’re pretty certain it’s Plugra, so yeah). There’s good reason the French eat a billion and a half of these every year.

While La Verne itself is a little sandwich sad, we’re happy to know that we’ve got at least three fantastic local sandwich offerings, with Padua Pasta Makers, Wolfe’s Market Kitchen and Deli, and, of course, Crème.

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

Overall: +6 points, or Xoco’s Milanesa Torta

(Previous post here.)

June 24: Roma Market

918 N Lake Ave, Pasadena

Here during the Summer of Sandwich, it’s fair to wonder if maybe you’ve heard of the chicken sandwich wars. Chick-fil-A, the Christian purveyor that’s faithfully closed every Sunday, made its bones with a solid but overrated chicken sandwich: it’s not particularly good, it was just better than everyone else’s for a long, long time. Then folks started protesting their anti-LBGTQIA beliefs. Enter Popeyes, of all places. Hey, I make good chicken, thought Popeye. Why not a sandwich? You certainly know the craze that followed the unveiling of Popeyes chicken sandwich, the lines, the sellouts, the social media madness. (FWIW: Popeyes version is vastly superior to Chick-fil-A. Also: What does Popeye have to do with Popeyes?) Now everyone else is following suit: McDonald’s, whose sandwiches sound good only because Bryan Cox voices the commercials; Burger King (voiced by Paul Giamatti, I’m pretty sure—these sound worse) has the utterly nonsensical Ch King, with its equally nonsensical commercial that looks very much to have been stolen off The Masked Singer cutting room floor. Wendy’s and Jack in the Box are trying to remind everyone they’ve always had bad chicken sandwiches. Even, inexplicably, In-N-Out. (Not really. Or: not yet.)

Anyway: as part of their chicken sandwich land grab, Popeyes is now calling theirs “The Sandwich.”

Listen carefully: Popeyes does not sell The Sandwich.

Roma Market does.

You can read more here—Jenn Harris does a better job at this than me—and learn about the history of The Sandwich, a creation that very much checks our early Unified Sandwich Theory© boxes: complete roll? Check. Simple high-quality toppings? Check. That’s it, that’s our theory. The Sandwich is: salami, mortadella, capicola, provolone (not overly sharp), and a drizzle of olive oil on a Sicilian style roll. The end.

Everything on this sandwich is good. The mortadella is fantastic. The salami is out of this world. And guess what? Unlike Popeyes, Roma Market also has ANOTHER The Sandwich: the vegetarian version. You thought the OG was simple? The vegetarian The Sandwich has: swiss (good swiss, not American crap swiss), provolone, and marinated artichokes. That. Is. It.

It might even be The Better The Sandwich.

Go to Roma Market. Walk in. Grab a The Sandwich—even more impressively, they’re premade—and plop down the six bucks they each cost. Get one of each, even. Eat. Be happy.

• Overall Balance/Taste: 2 points
• Quality of Ingredients: +2
• Bread: +2
• Integrity:
• X-factor: Italian market! +1

Overall: 7 points, or Xoco’s Milanesa Torta

June 26

A Sweet Affair Bakery: 1815 Ygnacio Valley Rd Suite F, Walnut Creek

Two sandwich places in one meal! Bail posted, we were finally allowed to leave the Southern California region. And where to go but one’s in-laws in beautiful Walnut Creek, the most suburbian suburb in the West? Happily, the in-laws were excited about our blog, and they wanted to take part, and even more exciting, Vieve wanted to introduce me to A Sweet Affair Bakery, known colloquially as Sweet Affair and as the maker of the Kaplan family’s favorite sandwich of all-time. Does brother Josh love the sandwich? He does. Do Ma and Pa Kaplan pick up a sandwich every now and then and head up to Mt. Diablo for a nice picnic? They do!

My expectations: raised.

Unified Sean Theory©: Don’t raise Sean’s expectations.

Rather than belaboring the family favorite, I’ll simply include a picture of the sandwich, describe its composition, and share an anecdote.

Here’s the menu description: “Turkey ~ Generous portions of freshly sliced turkey with cream cheese, avocado, cranberry sauce, sunflower seeds, Swiss cheese, sprouts, and lettuce. One bite and you will find yourself craving for more.”

Just to repeat: cream cheese, avocado, cranberry sauce. Sound…mushy? And the anecdote: supposedly the sesame herb bread is the only way to truly enjoy this sandwich. (Though, I don’t know—maybe a soup bowl?) Well misfortune struck this sad June Sunday as the bakery ran out of sesame herb bread without telling our orderer, Ma Kaplan. When she went to pay, they handed her the sandwich…made on multigrain. We were circling in our car in the parking lot, so we couldn’t hear Ma Kaplan’s verbal response to this affront. But we could see her gesticulations. They weren’t pleased gesticulations.

New Unified Sandwich Theory© entry: Don’t cross Ma Kaplan when it comes to sandwich breads. You’ve been warned.

• Overall Balance/Taste: Sean: 0 points            Vieve: 800 nostalgia points
• Quality of Ingredients: Sean: 0 points            Vieve: all
• Bread: Sean: 0 points              Ma Kaplan: -90 points
• Integrity: -2 points (consensus)
• X-factor: sentiment?: +1

Overall: -1 point, or your standard PB&J

Brioche de Paris: 1421 Locust St, Walnut Creek

Our second place was Brioche de Paris, a bakery in fancypants DTWC. We ordered, between the four of us, the turkey, cheese, and pesto (pesto and cheese?) and the salami, cornichon, and butter, both served, of course, on house-made baguettes.

We took a bite of the sandwiches. We chewed.

We chewed.

We chewed.

We’re still chewing.

Other than that…the bread actually had fine flavor (and flavor, and flavor). On our sandwich, the salami was meh, the buttery barely present (either visually or in terms of taste), and the cornichons were utterly hilarious: four tiny guys on a foot-long sandwich. Is that really a topping? It is not. For shame, Brioche de Paris.

• Overall Balance/Taste: boring points
• Quality of Ingredients: eh
• Bread: chewy
• Integrity: totally
• X-factor: the crème brulee madeleines looked really good!: +1

Overall: -1 point, or your standard PB&J

June 29: Country Kwik Market and Deli

3024 W Temple Ave, Pomona

And another thing about sandwiches: WTF with all the sandwich places closing so early in the day? I’m guessing it’s because most are bakeries which open really early so by midafternoon the workers just want to go home…and maybe many (at least the good ones) are family-run, by families who like each other and want to go home and spend time together…and maybe, most of all, Americans don’t really think of sandwiches as dinner. Foolish Americans.

In our immediate area, not counting the sandwich chain that shall not be named, all the good sandwich places close up shop at, variously, 7pm…6pm…3pm…2pm…and, too, they’re variously closed on Sunday … or Monday … or Tuesday … or just give us sandwiches, please?

Anyway: while Country Kwik has good reviews, we don’t recommend it (unless you’re stocking up on strange varieties of Kettle chips, which, sure, do that). We got the turkey and cheese and the Italian. On the former: The turkey: meh. The cheese: meh. The extra avocado and cucumber? Not bad? We also got the Italian, a sandwich varietal I’ve been avoiding all summer (Roma’s The Sandwich is not an “Italian,” to be clear—it’s a “The Sandwich”). I always used to get Italian grinders growing up, mostly because they were the one sandwich that never came with mayo, and as all mayo-haters know, requesting no mayo on a sandwich that normally comes with mayo guarantees nothing. Italians were safe, is the thing.

Also gross, is the new thing. Because an Italian sandwich is what—a way to sneak bologna into a sandwich? A way to increase your sodium intake a thousand-fold? Why hide mortadella behind pepperoni…why even put pepperoni on a sandwich … why again bologna? … and how does ham fit into all this? Was someone thinking, Hey, not enough cured meat, let’s add ham! Can an Italian be good? Possibly. But the ingredients need to be good. These were not. The bread was rough—by far the worst of the summer—and the meats were mostly individual salt bombs that together became a cluster salt bomb.

I want to take it easy on Country Kwik, as it’s a fairly busy small market with that amazing chip selection, and the counter guy was also doubling as the sandwich guy, meaning he was making our sandwiches while also working the very busy register. Not his fault he couldn’t give our sandwiches the full attention a good sandwich deserves…but he didn’t order the ingredients, so the real problem doesn’t rest on his sandwich shoulders. The best part: not surprisingly, the shredded lettuce, tomato, and oil and vinegar. This ingredient combo—simple, familiar—is a crucial ingredient on an American style sandwich: Unified Sandwich Theory© confirmed.

• Overall Balance/Taste: -1 point
• Quality of Ingredients: -1 point
• Bread: -1 point
• Integrity:
• X-factor: Chile Verde Kettle chips! +1

Overall: -2 points, or Bologna & Mayo on Wonder bread

(Previous post here.)

Padua Pasta Makers: 300 E Arrow Hwy, Upland

We’re loving the Summer of Sandwich. It’s not always perfect—sometimes those train tracks lead only to heartbreak, or shitty sandwiches, anyway. But more than simply delivering unto us good food, it’s had the ancillary effect of forcing us to do something we do far too rarely: the unknown.

The unknown is terrifying, of course, but also it’s exhilarating, right? (And also more often than either of those, it’s just as boring as the ordinary everyday known.) But still: it’s unknown! Which means: ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN. Which in and of itself is a good thing, or that’s how we’re feeling today, after two excellent recent sandwich outings. The first of these was midday Saturday, when we decided to drive down Arrow Highway in La Verne, which turns into 9^th Street in Upland, and then we took a left on Euclid and then a right on…Arrow Highway…?…which led us to downtown Upland.

Downtown Upland (nee North Ontario, almost Magnolia) is sort of hilarious. It’s a fairly built-up downtown, due almost entirely to the train station, and some buildings likely date to the early 1900s. It has about six solid blocks of business buildings. It has a candy apple store because what burgeoning megalopolis doesn’t need a candy apple store? And a gazebo in the middle of a roundabout! Also most of the businesses are shuttered. The most common open business seems to be the rock’n’roll T-shirt shop (we’re going back, don’t worry). There were a couple bars, a brewery, some coffee shops, tattoo shops…and lots of rock’n’roll t-shirt shops (and a bunch of sort of stray late teenagers wandering with skateboards underarm). Does it feel like downtown Upland was once a thriving spot of commerce? No, it feels like it’s always been this way—a little hungover, a little bored, never quite as exciting as it hoped things would be.

But adjacent to downtown is Padua Pasta Makers—which, who knew?! It’s basically a mini-Eataly without the ass-grabbing ginger in crocs. They make: fresh pasta, sauce, calzones, pizza; they sell 00 flour, spumante, Stracciatella, and all sorts of fun Italian condiments. Padua Pasta Makers is excellent. We will definitely be going back. And even better? Their sandwiches. We ordered a small roasted chicken with roasted red pepper ($7.50) and a small mortadella with provolone (also $7.50). These “small” sandwiches—each well over six inches—came in a complete sandwich roll, and the bread was by far the best we’ve had all summer. The excellent chicken had been roasted with oregano and rosemary, we think, and while it was a little dry, we went sans mayo, so that’s on us—next time we’d get the pesto mayo. The mortadella (with pistachio) was amazing, which is no surprise, because mortadella is the best cured meat. (Read more about mortadella!) Its almost ethereally light savoriness played nicely with a not-overly-funky provolone and that simplest deli sandwich topping: shredded lettuce drizzled with oil and vinegar. Done.

• Overall Balance/Taste: +2 points
• Quality of Ingredients: +2
• Bread: +2
• Integrity:
• X-factor: Italian market! +1

Overall: 7 points, or Xoco’s Milanesa Torta

Tortas Ahogadas La Guera: 1205 W 17th St, Santa Ana

Speaking of the unknown: today we went to a zoo! That cost two dollars!

We decided to be brave and venture not only into the unknown but also behind enemy lines, going deep behind the Orange Curtain. Why? We like zoos. Sure, they make us feel weird every time—don’t you, too, feel tempted to free the animals?—but this was a zoo we didn’t know existed until a few days ago. Everyone knows the LA Zoo, the San Diego Zoo, and the Wild Animal Park or whatever it’s been rebranded to these days. Most people know about the Santa Ana Zoo and the Santa Barbara Zoo. But…the Orange County Zoo? Who knew this zoo? You? We saw: kit foxes, enormous porcupines, eagles, bears, mountain lions, ocelots (Babu! because apparently Dali had an ocelot?!)…and snakes.

Post-zoo, we thought: sandwiches. Weird, right? The problem with being deep behind the Curtain is that mainly what they sell behind said Curtain is Subway sandwiches. Seriously, do a Google map search in the OC for sandwiches. I’ll wait. See? So. Much. Subway. So we were forced to branch out a bit … not out of our comfort zone so much as squarely in it: we went for tortas.

(Will tortas be the best of all sandwich styles? Tune in at summer’s end to find out!)

We went to Tortas Ahogadas La Guera, a food truck in Santa Ana. Why? Yelp, we admit it. We got there just before the lunch rush and ordered, of course, a torta ahogada (that means drowned, everyone). We got the carnitas, and it was ready almost immediately: a surprisingly high quality half-section of baguette filled with mounds of solid if not spectacular carnitas, the sandwich, yes, drowned in two types of hot sauce and piled high with sliced white onion. It was warm and spicy, just like red kibble, so, yes, it’s basically belter food. Was it amazing? No. Was it good? Mi pensa gut.

Good thing we got a regular torta, too! This one came on a telera roll (sort of like French bread but less puffy: crispy exterior, toasted on the inside, still with a nice chew to it: so it has both a crisp texture and soft pillowy sandwich goodness that keeps the fillings in). All it had on it was their al pastor (not shaved but griddled and chopped to beautiful sweet-spicy-savory caramelization), chopped green lettuce, and some onion and tomato (and a side of great salsa—which is fine with a torta, Mendocino Farms). No cheese. No avocado. No crema. Just the star of the show and some veg accompaniment–and that was enough, because this torta was insanely good. There is something about having a spiciness that underpins each bite of a sandwich—not the occasional heat of a jalapeno slice you get in banh mi but a constant heat, an ongoingness of tingling that gets you sweating just a little, making you want to eat another bite as if somehow that’s going to cool things off…not to mention, again, the big sabor interplay of flavors and textures.

Did we know we were going to see a freaking swimming beaver when the day began, or that we were going to eat a sandwich as good as any we’ve had all summer? We did not. Ah, the power of not-knowing.

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

Overall: 4 points, or a perfectly tasty Pat’s Philly Cheesesteak (wit…and yes, this was weighed slightly down by the merely pretty good torta ahogada)

(Previous post here.)