#148 - Top Three Sandwiches I ate While 31

Sandwiches are my favorite food.

There are some really solid contenders in the top ten foods I love, but it always comes back to bread and fixings for me.

Thanksgiving is mostly a vehicle to create leftovers for the perfect turkey/cranberry/stuffing sandwich. Ross Geller understood this and was honestly justified in being upset that not only had his colleague stolen his perfect lunch but thrown most of his leftover sandwich away.

Sandwiches also tell stories.

They blend cultures together beautifully.

And they remind us that bread has always been a foundational part of what it means to be human. If there's one thing we and our collective ancestors love to do, it's break down some grains into flour and heat it until transformed.

Fluffy! Crusty! Sweet! Crunchy! Seeded or unseeded!

So many breads to fall in love with.

And I love most of them! But get that sourdough away from me I've had exactly one sourdough product I've ever liked and it was a sourdough french toast (from my cousins bakery in Ireland and who am I to say if it was the sourdough or the familial loyalty). I rarely want sour bread tbh. Sorry, San Fransisco! (& ancient Egypt!)

Baguettes are on the front lines of French culture propaganda. Never forgive imperialism just because it gave us bánh mì okay???? Promise?? (Obviously enjoying a bánh mì is still heavily encouraged I’m just saying in no way do we have to hand it to the french.)

Anyway, list time!

#3 - The New Gunther, Gunther's

A classic Caprese for the ages on very nice surprisingly crunchy bread.

Sandwiches are too expensive across the board now, but I will say for $14 I have never been disappointed in the quality of their ingredients.

A good tomato is heaven. A bad tomato is hell.

(A medium tomato is enough to make me upset about on-demand agriculture and out-of-season produce for the rest of the day.)

Gunther's took over a cafe in my neighborhood last year && the first time we ate there we overheard a fight in the kitchen where someone was being berated for not knowing what went on a BLT, but that was in like the first week of opening so I'm sure they've figured it out by now! I usually do pickup because I hate the layout of the inside/it's always cramped, and they've only missed the pickup once so it's become a semi-regular lunch option AND it was close enough that I was always willing to walk there this summer, a huge boon for their profits and my motivation to leave the house on 90+ days.

I think most of their menu is way too salty and their turkey sub has so much turkey it feels gross to eat (but the slaw is good) and the one time I got tomato soup it was super chunky and tasted more like a marinara and honestly put me entirely off soup for the rest of the winter last year but this list is about sandwiches and The New Gunther (pressed, please!) is a great one.

Their burger is also decent if you take the pickles off (and this isn't anti-pickle, I love pickles and usually add more pickles, but they made the burger funky and sometimes homemade pickles are just >like that<) and the sausage breakfast sandwich is trying its best but has way too much egg & sausage for the brioche bun which gets so soggy in the container that I had to eat it with a knife and fork.

I like the idea of the literal volume of food they're providing here but the thing about sandwiches is actually they come down to ratios and balance. Abundance isn’t always a benefit for flavors.

&& sandwiches are meant to be held.

It's kind of their whole thing!

#2 - The Green Goddess, Black Seed Bagels

Their seasonal bagels are hit or miss for me but oh baby did this one HIT.

We should be putting more banana peppers on every sandwich, tbh, and this bagel was perfect and I miss ordering it because it had so many wonderful veggies.

Green goddess cream cheese, sunflower shoots, watermelon radish, cucumbers, and banana peppers. So crunchy! So herby! So perfect to eat in the park!

Black Seed became far and away my favorite bagel place this year. They're Montreal-style which means I can actually bite into them without having to unhinge my jaw – and since one half of my front tooth is now fake I'm not allowed to take hard bites of things which makes the monsters from Knickerbocker intimidating.

They have an app with loyalty points, their pickup has gotten a lot smoother this year, it's half a mile from my house so it's a great little jaunt to do first thing in the morning, and the biggest email tease ever was getting a subject line announcing that every single one of their stores was opening at 7am now — only to open it and realize that my store was the exception to that rule. False advertising! A personal attack!

The tuna melt was my most ordered (by far I love a tuna melt & diet coke for the ultimate #breakfastofchampions) overall this year, and while I find their BEC bland as fuck in general it is actually so good once you add salt/pepper and use it as a vehicle for Brown Sauce.

#1 - Chicken & Stuffing Sandwiches, Spars & every other convenience store in Ireland

As much as I love a complicated honker on crusty bread, I am equally infatuated with a simple quick sandwich with 2-3 ingredients on sliced bread that can be bought at every single gas station/spar/convenience shop across my favorite tiny overcast at all times country.

They're made fresh everyday and then shipped all over the country and they're so basic it seems ridiculous to claim that they are one of my all-time favorite foods and one of the things I miss most about that country.

I think I ate a chicken & stuffing 5/7 days I was there. I always got Taytos (cheese & onion, obviously) and shoved some of them between the bread too.

Didn't have a dud! Loved every bite! Dream of America figuring out how to make simple sandwiches that are ready to go that I don't have to wait for someone to make it for me! Why is 7/11 so bad on the mainland when they have incredible options in Hawaii! I am so jealous of 7/11s in Japan I want a tuna rice ball too!!

<< theatre kid voice >> Thank you, food

Demonizing food is always so funny to me. Like, you really do have to laugh that so many people avoid potatoes because they've been psyopped into believing that a vegetable is unhealthy.

Like.

It's a vegetable.

Bread suffers from the worst PR for the same reason: carbs are thee enemy. But they're not because they're fuel, but they are because they spike your glucose, but they're not because they are a staple of a well-rounded diet, but they are because–

It's exhausting.

It's a miracle to live in a time of abundance. Food waste is so devastating because food insecurity remains high. To be blessed with access to food, this much food, food that tastes this good, and to be consumed with fear/worry about eating is just the most heartbreaking way to live.

I just want to do some good PR for food because so much of it is bad. Food so often gets discussed in a feast or famine way, cheat days vs. sticking to a diet. Rarely neutral, almost always with a guilty sheen attached for "indulging" when all that means is like, eating lunch.

It's almost impossible to have a normal relationship with food in the current culture we live in. So I'm not trying to pass judgement on anyone (and it would truly be an l-o-l if I did – I didn't even recognize my second wave eating disorder had been happening for years until it was pointed out to me by a friend) I'm just saying that food is delicious and yes it's all about balance of consumption (true for literally everything, too much water can kill you, etc.) but it's also about exploring different places around neighborhoods, having fun and pointing out all of the decor details in a restaurant, learning about history or fusion of cultures or new flavor profiles or traditions or stories of immigrants who came and invented a new version of their beloved dishes because what people make fun of as "Americanized" is usually the result of the first generation interpreting their classic dishes with the ingredients that were available in their new homeland!

It's fucking cool! What does authentic even mean?!

Like yeah sure, pasta in Italy is great, but it's also pretty dedicated to being one thing. The refusal to do anything but traditional has stagnated innovation – which is fine because Little Italy's exists in every major American city and you wouldn't believe the shit they're doing with lasagnas these days. & you know who wins? We do! It's amazing that we have so much great pasta out there now, wherever people are eating it!

(It just makes my brain go ✨whirrrr-boink✨ when people try to defend Italian traditional cooking as the only way because a ton of Italian dishes were reinterpreted during the Mussolini era & replaced chicken with pork to make sure even the food was antisemitic. So. What tradition? From when? Be specific!)

General Tso may not have been a real person, but the guy who made the dish was! Tex-Mex doesn't deserve to be sneered at! Corn belongs in desserts!!

Anyway, sandwiches forever, I love food, bread is so good and every culture throughout history makes their own version of it. So just like music, drugs, alcohol, and finding random plants to chew on/smoke and get a little head rush from – bread is and always has been a defining part of what it means to be alive.