Sandwiches: a retrospective

Prepare for a long one, Beyhive

One dinner last week was a sandwich from the good bodega, served with pickle flavored potato chips (not to be confused with pickle chips), and an Arizona Green Tea.

Although this is not food that I cooked, I do have a lot to say about it. Firstly, what makes this bodega good, you ask? In truth it’s not particularly special. It’s two long blocks west from my apartment, and before he moved into my place, John briefly lived in a sublet across the street. Sometimes on his way over to Netflix and chill, he’d stop at that bodega and pick up my platonic ideal sandwich: turkey, roast beef, swiss, lettuce, tomato, pickled jalapeños, black olives mayo, brown mustard. This one bodega guy used to make it particularly well, but there are many bodegas can do it just the same. I think we started calling it good bodega because the one right on my corner closes at like 6 pm, and the second closest one to me makes horrible sandwiches. It’s all relative. Anyway, that’s the really boring story of how GBS got its name.

What’s not boring (to me) is how much I love sandwiches. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of gazing upon my body, you’ll know that I have a tattoo of a sandwich on my arm. I got it when I was spending the summer in Italy in 2019, working for a beautiful human named Andrea who owns an agriturismo along a Tuscan hillside. The tattoo artist, who I had been following on Instagram for a while, is Italian, but he comes to Brooklyn often. I was fully planning on seeing him in Greenpoint one day, until one morning he posted that he was in a town called Follonica, about a 20 minute drive from Andrea’s property. I emailed Luca on a Monday, and he invited me in that Friday.

With no knowledge of how to drive a manual car or any understanding of Italian roadways, I explained the situation to Andrea and asked for a ride (his response: “un panino??”) and we packed up his 82 year old mother-in-law and my fellow volunteer, a German girl named Uli, into Andrea’s filthy white Fiat and took a family road trip toward the small beach town. Pictured below is the first photographic evidence of my tattoo, my suspicious/annoyed look courtesy of Andrea’s laughing at me because he couldn’t believe that I, crazy Americana, had actually just gotten a tattoo of a panino.

I’m not going to take the time to explain why I think sandwiches are so good, attempting to describe bread in new ways and using similes to illustrate what folded meats look like. This is the reason I love this newsletter - I can be a lazy writer and have no one to answer to except myself, who is proud of me for writing anything at all right now, when I have to be awake in literally 5 hours to work on another goddamn Buffalo Wild Wings commercial. (Author’s note: I started writing this post 2 weeks prior to my publishing it now. The more I wrote about sandwiches that night, the deeper the hole I dug for myself. I ended up getting 3 hours of sleep, and work the next day was miserable.)

Instead, I’ll just share a bunch of pictures of sandwiches that have come into my life, and be shocked if literally anyone reads through this entire post.

I ate this sandwich (“Babylonian Beef”) just a few weeks ago in Vermont with John’s cousin Laura and her husband Pedro, at a funky little spot in Burlington called Four Corners of the Earth (amazing name for a sandwich place).

One man basically makes a litany of elaborate sandwiches all himself, all on this pillowy beautiful bread. I asked where it was from, and he sort of laughed and responded “a bakery” - behind the counter was what looks like cheap Italian loaves that you can get at any chain grocery store. He cuts them into slices, however, instead of putting the sandwich contents into it like a hero/hoagie/whatever. It shockingly makes a world of a difference.

The above sandwich is one I made myself using (not cheap) Italian bread from a fantastic bakery in Ridgewood called Monreale, and a mishmash of ingredients that weren’t meant to be together, but then again Tyler Kord has a recipe for a meatloaf sandwich with grape jelly and pickled shrimp, and I really love his book. I wrote more about that above sandwich here.

The picture above makes me sad, because Rolo’s doesn’t make this sandwich anymore, and their (homemade!) smoked turkey with (essentially) Thousand Island dressing, pickled celery, and blue cheese on their chewy ciabatta is one that I’ll never forget.

As you could probably tell from the scenic background, I made this sandwich around Christmas last year - ham, apples, brie, dijon, and mayo all on a stunning baguette from L’imprimerie, a French bakery a mere 6 minute walk from my apartment that I don’t feel I’ve done enough good in my life to deserve.

That Italian stallion is from a sandwich shop in FiDi called Pisillo Italian Panini. It’s the best/only place in FiDi to get lunch that isn’t a Just Salad or whatever. They’re Italian Italian, not even Italian American. Everything is imported, and they pronounce my name LAU-ra instead of LOR-uh and it feels good. Take it from my friend Drew (hi Drew!), who lives in FiDi:

The sandwich below is from a restaurant around the corner from my sister’s apartment on the Upper East Side called Triple Decker Diner. I love old New York diners like one this more than words can express.

Buckle up for a world tour, because next up in my maniacal listicle is Sandwiches: International Edition. The sandwich below was consumed at a futbol game in Barcelona with my cutie brothers, where I watched Lionel Messi score some grand slams or whatever, but I obviously cared more about my jamon.

This next sandwich was lunch the day I agreed to make a Craigslist pickup in Seagate, a rare and eerily quiet gated community in New York, just west of Coney Island. For more about what I bought on Craigslist from an elderly Russian man that day, stay tuned for the upcoming Craigslist: a Retrospective, which will be 65% longer than this post.

Anyway, we got off the train that day in Gravesend in South Brooklyn, and stopped at John’s Deli, an institution with an enviable mural, and sandwiches named mostly after characters from Goodfellas and Entourage.

These two sandwiches below are from a place in my neighborhood called Carmenta’s that I’ve mentioned before because they get their bread from Caputo’s bakery and it’s really the best. The first one is a fried eggplant sandwich with ricotta and mint, and the one below is some kind of Italian wombo combo. Plus they wrap them in that reddish brown butcher paper and use lime green painters tape to tape them up. It’s an aesthetic, and I love it.

I could keep going (for a long time), but I’ll stop now.

If you made it to the end, your reward/punishment is more of my writing. I really hate that I’m such a night person.