Malibu Chicken — Johny’s Kitchen, Cal State Los Angeles

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I am a firm believer that one should never judge an establishment by one bad experience. In nearly all situations, a bad sandwich can be excused by any number of things, and the other items on offer might be superior. Unfortunately, if you keep going back to the same sub-par establishment in hopes they will impress you the next time can sometimes leave you feeling like a fool. It is a dicey proposition.

I endeavored to try out another item at Johny’s Kitchen, feeling that, since they had so many sandwiches on offer, my previous horrible breakfast sandwich experience was perhaps an anomaly. I selected (as is my custom) the most intriguing menu item. In this case, the Malibu Chicken. Advertised as “breaded chicken,” ham, and Swiss cheese on my choice of bread, I placed my order and was not asked a bread preference. Thus, I received a deep-fried frozen chicken patty, a slice of ham thrown upon a grill while the patty fried, tomato, lettuce, and mayonnaise on a sesame seed bun.

I have been having bad luck with bland sandwiches as of late, so we can add another one to that list. The patty was flavorless, there was too much lettuce, and the cheese, mayo and one thin slice of ham were indistinguishable from one another and hardly detectable. Malibu chicken, not in its sandwich form, is a spin on chicken cordon bleu; a means of making a gourmet dish approachable. In that respect, this sandwich is appropriately named. This is a low-class sandwich for a palate so undiscerning as to become negligible.

La Cubana – Casita Chilanga, El Camino Real, Redwood City, CA

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A little while back La Casita Chilanga was the subject of a review by a fellow sandwich enthusiast, and I made a note to give the place a try myself. In order to keep the comparison strict I ordered the same thing, La Cubana. It’s a monster of a sandwich, as wide as the plate it comes on, stuffed with pork leg, ham, breaded beef steak, chorizo, and sausage, in addition to standard issue stuff like tomato, onion, avocado, and a chipotle mayo. From the linked review, I was expecting “an explosion of meat and crunchy grilled flat bread,” and so I was a bit surprised with what I got. Given such a physically wide palate, the Cubana is built not so much up as out. It isn’t a towering sandwich; there’s a lot going on but It handled well and was completely manageable. Altogether, the whole thing seems almost, well, restrained.

This isn’t all upside, as a single portion of avocado was not nearly enough to cover the sandwich. That’s disappointing, but not entirely unexpected. In a sandwich this size, it’s difficult to get coverage the whole way across, and you often end up with ingredients pairing off rather than working all together. You get a bite of ham and steak here, a bit of chorizo and pork there. The ham had been crisped up via hot skillet or flat top, and that made all the difference in both flavor and texture. The sausage listed was, near as I could tell, the humble hot dog, but I note that as an item of interest rather than a fault. In fact, I found the ingredient combinations that presented themselves as I ate to be highly satisfactory, and overall would rate this a fine sandwich.

Pan con Chicharron – Sanguchon, San Francisco Bay Area

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Sanguchon is a Bay Area food truck providing Peruvian street food, and I was excited to try their wares. At a glance, the Pan con Chicharron seems like an extraordinarily appetizing sandwich. Sliced pork loin joins fried yams, salsa criolla and aji rocoto aioli on a roll baked (they say) exclusively for their truck. Those aren’t ingredients you see every day, and though I enjoy a good torta, too much of anything gets old. Salsa criolla is a salsa with a red onion and cilantro base, and aji ricoto is a chili pepper with more heat than a poblano but not as much as hot jalapeño. So you’ve got savory pork,  a crispy sweetness in the yams, a sharp salsa corralling things a little heat playing over everything. That’s a potentially great sandwich, and I strongly suspect that there are days when the sandwich Sanguchon serves lives up to that potential. Sadly, the day that I got my hands on it it failed to meet its mark. I will say that the bread was very good, chewy and with a flavorful crust. There was no disappointment there. I have neither a strong affinity for nor a strong grudge against food trucks,  but I can’t help but wonder if the fact that this sandwich came from a truck had a lot to do with inconsistency. There’s an urgency in serving food from a truck, especially when it’s busy (and it was busy.) People stand around waiting, it doesn’t lend itself to conversation or nursing a drink, and so you want to get them their food as fast as possible. Sometimes that means the food comes out terribly unbalanced, with large, meaty pieces of pork crying out for salsa and aioli, yams delightful when present but unaccounted for in far too many bites. Had someone taken a bit more time putting the sandwich together I suspect it would have been a very different result. Alas, one cannot dine on possibility. It is reality we dig in to, and the reality at Sanguchon was a disappointing sandwich.

Hamburger & Egg Sandwich — Pete’s Blue Chip, Colorado Blvd., Los Angeles

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Pete’s Blue Chip on Colorado Boulevard in Eagle Rock is a curious establishment. Situated awkwardly, seemingly run-down and with a bizarre menu, it took me an exceedingly long time to figure out which sandwich to order. I decided at last upon the hamburger and egg sandwich, and after having consumed it, I am no less puzzled.

The hamburger and egg sandwich — and it is a sandwich, as it comes on your choice of bread, with “bun” not being an option; that is a separate section of the menu — is a strange creation indeed, at least the one that was constructed for me that day.

The sandwich consisted of a thin hamburger patty, an enormous quantity of scrambled eggs, iceberg lettuce, a dollop of mayonnaise and a truly gargantuan slice of tomato on an English muffin. In the eating, it was exceedingly and perhaps a bit unsurprisingly bland. Not nearly so bland as my egg-and-little-else sandwich from some time ago, but quite bland, indeed.

The strange thing about this sandwich is that so much could have gone right were any of the ingredients swapped out for another. Were the hamburger patty instead a sausage patty; were the lettuce or tomato instead red onion; were the mayonnaise instead Dijon or stone-ground mustard; were the eggs fried rather than scrambled…any of these would have represented an exponential upgrade in both flavor and quality. The concept had unlimited potential. With just one small tweak, this sandwich could have come close to living up to that potential.

Honey Dijon Chicken Sandwich – Union Street Tavern, Union St, Windsor, CT

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I have previously said that including fried ingredients on a sandwich is pass/fail, but that can be a misleading claim. It’s true, but can be overly reductive. After all, isn’t any ingredient in a sandwich pass/fail? It either makes for a better sandwich or it doesn’t. The reason I use it when discussing fried ingredients is that generally speaking, if something is fresh fried than it’s a beneficial ingredient, and if it’s not then it isn’t. What Union Street Tavern demonstrates, sadly, is that the margin for failure is larger than the one for success. The chicken on the honey dijon sandwich was in fact freshly fried, but it was also way overdone, leaving the crust hard and blackened in places. It seems like fine sandwich in concept, breaded chicken breast, honey dijon mustard, swiss cheese, bacon, lettuce and tomato. Additionally, failing on the side of overcooking is a more encouraging failure than a soggy, limp fried chicken breast. One is a failure of execution, the other is a failure of effort, and those are two very different things. I’ve had other food at Union Street, and it has been tasty fare. I’m inclined to think this was just a slip-up, the sort of thing that happens to all but the best restaurants. That was of little comfort to me in the moment, but I won’t hesitate to give Union Street another shot.

Blackened Chicken on Roast Squash Bread – Made at Home

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Recently I found myself with some leftover squash that had been tossed in garam marsala and roasted. Like any sandwich enthusiast, my thoughts immediately turned to how I might incorporate those leftovers into a sandwich. Rather than the standard route of piling it between bread, though, I thought I might try something a bit different and incorporate it into the bread. So I did just that, combining a cup of diced/shredded roast squash into a whole wheat dough, kneading it smooth and baking it up. With the bread baked, I turned to the rest of the sandwich.

Thinking back to the stellar number I had at Sun de Vich, my first thought was a spread of Greek yogurt, mint, and finely diced red onion. A chicken breast got a healthy coating of salt and pepper, cayenne, chili powder, and garam masala before going down in the skillet, and a few poblano peppers got flattened out and stuck under the broiler. Bringing everything together, it looked like I had a somewhat sparse but perfectly serviceable sandwich. Alas, looks can be deceiving. I wouldn’t call this sandwich an out-and-out failure, but it’s not exactly a success. It’s successful if considered an experiment, but as a finished sandwich it came up terribly short. Firstly, the spice on the chicken proved to be a bit overwhelming. While piling on more yogurt helped that, at that point you end up with flavors fighting each other rather than working together. Secondly, the taste of the squash was completely lost. It was present when the bread was tasted on its own, but by the time the sandwich came together it was long gone. I hadn’t expected a really bold squash flavor (if I’d wanted that I could have just included the squash on standard bread) but there was really no squash flavor of which to speak. So the very thing I’d set out to feature disappeared. I think that there are some strong ideas here, and in the future they’ll work out to a better sandwich, but here and now all I had was a too-spicy sandwich and a missing squash.

Tennessee BBQ Pork — River Belle Terrace, Disneyland

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The River Belle Terrace is located on the border of Frontierland and New Orleans Square in Disneyland and features a few different sandwiches on offer. The Tennessee BBQ Pork is pulled pork in a thick BBQ sauce served on a soft white roll. It comes with a plastic cup of beans and your choice of cold salad.

The pork is tasty enough, with the sauce being about as appetizing as your average inoffensive BBQ sauce. The bread is spongy and unexceptional but holds the contents adequately. It isn’t a chore to eat, isn’t stale and can definitely hit the spot. Anywhere else in the world, this would be a mediocre, unexceptional or even disappointing sandwich. As far as Disneyland sandwiches go (and I have had my fair share), it is above-average. It does not approach the Monte Cristo at the Blue Bayou or the small offerings available during the food and wine festival at Disney’s California Adventure, but if you are at the park and in need of a bite, it will more than suffice.

Slummin’ It – All American Patty Melt, Red Robin

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Red Robin is primarily a vendor of hamburgers, with a selection of chicken sandwiches that appear to be more or less hamburgers with chicken breasts swapped in for the beef patty. But the menu also boasts the “All-American Patty Melt,” and that was what I went with. The patty melt is a sandwich with history but without glamour, which leads to it getting something of a short shrift. It’s easy to just figure it’s a hamburger on toast, or a cheeseburger with a patty in the middle, but that sells the whole thing short. I don’t mean to make too much of it, obviously it’s not a sandwich of electrifying genius, but it is a mid-century American classic. (Californian classic, to be precise. Tiny Naylor put it together at his coffee shop sometime in the 40s or 50s, at the corner of La Brea & Sunset that now houses an El Pollo Loco.) It’s a simple but complete sandwich: Patty, thousand island dressing, sauteed onions, and cheese (preferably swiss) on marbled rye. Red Robin’s version was exactly that, with no re-imagining or unnecessary deconstructing.

Here’s something else that Red Robin’s All-American Patty Melt was: It was the item on the menu with the most calories. In a chain that will gussy up a hamburger with all manner of fried this and sauteed that, I got a chuckle out of the humble patty melt being the most substantial thing on the menu. When it arrived, though, I was a bit taken aback. Where did those 1400 calories go? It’s two slices of rye, two slices of swiss, a patty of not unreasonable size, a couple ounces of dressing and some onions. According to the nutritional information, it isn’t even grilled in butter, they use margarine. Similar to what I’ve found previously while Slummin’ It, there seems to be so much less present than the calorie count would indicate. So there’s some kind of mystery here, about what’s in the dressing or what kind of cheese they use or just what the fat ratio of the beef is. It’s a puzzler, one I haven’t quite figured out yet. Beyond just the simple math of it, the sandwich isn’t particularly rich or indulgent. For all of those calories, you don’t get a sense that you’re eating something especially decadent, or even especially good. It’s not really bad, but most of it is just sort of there. I don’t think that’s quite so damning as it can be in other contexts. With something like a hamburger, “good enough” is enough to sink things, because you likely walked past a better hamburger on your way to the one you’re eating. A patty melt, on the other hand, isn’t the most common offering. It’s far from inconceivable that you might find yourself craving a patty melt and find that Red Robin is your only real option. If that ends up being the case, I should say that this would hit the spot. I wouldn’t suggest that it be someone’s first patty melt, but it’s a sandwich that knows where to set its mark, and it hits that mark. In the end, there are a lot of things worse than a good-enough patty melt.

Kotlet Sandwich – Bijan Bakery & Cafe, Market St, San Jose, CA

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I believe that almost anything can be effectively incorporated into a sandwich, given the right plan and proper execution. There aren’t many things at which I’ll turn my nose up on sight. That said, I often despair at the sight of iceberg lettuce. Don’t get me wrong; like anything else, it has its place. It’s got a lot of water to it, and it it’s pretty crispy, so it works well in spicy situations, or playing against softer ingredients. More often than not, though, it’s not deployed in those situations but instead is just the thoughtless lettuce of the lazy, an unthinking default offering, adding nothing to the sandwich. Combine it with the sight of a mushy slice of hothouse tomato and before your first bite you know that this is a sandwich where nobody was trying very hard. That’s always disappointing, but it’s exceptionally so when other ingredients are above par. The bread at Bijan Bakery was stupendous, a flavorful sourdough with a really substantial crust. The kotlet, a patty of ground meat with a strong dose of turmeric, was also pretty tasty. There was a bit of always-tasty whole grain mustard involved as well, leaving the sandwich a puzzling bundle of contrasting elements. Could this sandwich have been the product of some committee, half its members putting in care and experience, the other half slacking off? Was it assembled by survey, or by mishmash of remaining parts? Perhaps someone died in front of a half-created sandwich, and some uncaring distant relative wrapped things up without a thought for the legacy! I’m sure the real story is much more mundane, but whatever that story is, what sat in front of me was inescapable fact: I had been served a sub-par sandwich.

The Hodge-Podge — Dave’s Chillin’ & Grillin’, Colorado Blvd., Los Angeles

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I have written about Dave’s Chillin’ & Grillin’ before. The Boston transplant has an affinity for pepper spread and unorthodox creations, so I was not surprised when he recommended an off-menu item when I stopped in one January afternoon.

“The Hodge-Podge,” as he fittingly has titled it, is just that. The sandwich is, at its base, a meatball sub, which Dave creates with aplomb (and, of course, with pepper spread). To this, he adds pastrami and roast beef, both sliced thin, and the Hodge-Podge is born. I admit, I expected this to be a mere gimmick, with the sliced meat disappearing into the meatball sub. To my delight, the pastrami and roast beef added welcome layers of both flavor and texture. The result was not quite a reinvention of the meatball sub, but a lovely alternative.

Normally, things that are not broken do not need fixing. But one should always keep an open mind about putting a new spin on them.