Tag Archives: Pork

La Cubana – Tortas Boos Voni, Mission St, San Francisco, CA

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I try to take all sandwich related requests and suggestions seriously, but time and opportunity often conspire to keep an establishment on the to-visit list for quite a while. Tortas Boos Voni is one such establishment: More than a year ago, I dined on a pair of tortas milanesa and began to think that there was a really special torta out there somewhere. In the comments, regular commentor Doug recommended Tortas Boos Voni. It was only last week that I visited, but mercy do I ever wish I’d gone sooner. Simply put, this was the best torta I’ve ever had. I decided to skip the milanesa and go for the cubana, simply because it’s a higher degree of difficulty. It includes two kinds of milanesa, that of beef and of chicken, as well as ham, hot dog, and a well spiced shredded chicken thigh, all in addition to the usual tomatoes, onion, and mayo.

Balance is important on a sandwich, but what the ideal sandwich really drives for is harmony. Balance is the easiest way to get there; making sure ingredients contrast each other and that one doesn’t stand too far above the others is an easy way of making sure everything works together. The route taken by sandwiches like the cubana is more challenging, but done right it’s perfectly effective. The recipe for the sandwich is meat, meat and more meat, but the harmony is there. The issue is that if something like this falls out of harmony, it’s a long way down. Should it go wrong, it is likely to go very, very wrong.

But the cubana at Tortas Boos Voni doesn’t go wrong. It’s worth noting that this was a massive sandwich, easily a foot long and more than six inches across, with no real taper to the bun. So you have a huge sandwich with five different kinds of meat; making this sandwich a success is not a task for beginners. Well, someone at Tortas Boos Voni has an experienced hand, because this was spectacular. Everything inside was hot and tender, the patties milanesa both crisp. The bread was well toasted and stayed crispy for the substantial length of time it took to eat the sandwich. There wasn’t enough avocado, the exact problem I had with the last cubana I ate, but it wasn’t enough to derail the overall quality. Given how good this sandwich and the one at Casita Chilanga were, I’m almost afraid of how good they would be if given a proper amount of avocado. That, I put it to you, is the mark of a good sandwich. It could be better, sure, but it’s a little scary to think about what that might mean.

Bánh Mì Thịt Nướng – Phat Tri, Thien Huong & Aroma Coffee and Snacks – San Jose, CA

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I wanted to say goodbye to San Jose. I’m moving to Los Angeles next week. I’m excited for that – regular access to Phillipe’s, to Original Tommy’s, to Canter’s. In my head I’m already there, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I owe San Jose something, and I hope I have done it justice. I could have gone around and revisited favorite sandwiches, but that didn’t feel like a fitting tribute. What did feel like a fitting tribute was to sit down to new sandwiches, because that’s what San Jose has always offered.

Phat Tri charges $4 for the above bánh mì, which would be steep for the east side if the above picture weren’t merely half of the sandwich. The thing is a monster, bigger than your forearm. There’s no quantity-for-quality switch going on either, this is a fine sandwich. Quality bread, fresh veggies, the meat is tender and has a strong garlic/lemongrass/soy savory quality to it. There are a dozen of these sorts of shops in San Jose, places that are always mentioned in the never-ending best bánh mì discussion.

I noticed Thien Huong while eating at Phat Tri. The had a “Grand Opening” sign out front, and I figured anyone with the guts to open across the street from a place with Phat Tri’s reputation had to have a lot of faith that their sandwich was something special. I don’t know if that’s what Thien Huong thinks about their sandwiches, but it should be. The meat here was piping hot, freshly seared and bursting with the sweet & salty notes of the classic thịt nướng marinade. For every place like Phat Tri, with a reputation and a leigion of devotees, there are a dozen places like Thein Huong. They’re upstarts, latecomers to a crowded market, people with something to prove. Some of them back it up, some of them don’t. They come and go, becoming almost haunting. Maybe the next one is better than this one. You won’t know until you’ve tried it.

Aroma Coffe & Snacks is three and a half miles from the other two establishments. That wouldn’t be so far, if the distance weren’t stuffed with more sandwich shops. Aroma is tucked in to the back half of a shopping center that sits perpendicular to the street, it’s a little tough to see even when you’re looking for it. Seeking it out is worth the effort. Their thịt nướng is deeply caramelized, chewy and full of flavor. For every Thien Huong, there are another handful of Aroma Coffee & Snacks. Great sandwiches that leave you unsettled over how good the sandwiches might be at all the places you haven’t made the time to try.

I’ll be able to get a bánh mì in Los Angeles, but it won’t be like this. I could go try a new sandwich every weekend for a year and I wouldn’t have to double back. Most of them would be pretty good. The bánh mì is going places, and some day it will be widely popular and too big to really get a head around. When that happens, I’ll remember a city that did its damnedest to give a wonderful sandwich everything it deserved. Thanks for all the sandwiches, San Jose.

Winston’s Vesper – Big Word Cafe, Saratoga Sunnyvale Rd, Saratoga, CA

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Here we have a fine counter example to Monday’s meager offering of a sandwich. All the way on the other side of town, nearly a dollar and a half less than what I paid at Caffe Frascati nets me a much more satisfying sandwich. A few hearty slices of cumin spiced roast pork, a house made mango ginger chutney, roasted red peppers, cucumbers and spinach all pile on a white roll and come together quite nicely. This was clearly a sandwich from a coffee bar; it was served cold, and alltogether wasn’t quite everything it could have been. It was also missing the clear freshness that benefited the recent sandwich featured from Coach House, but despite all of that it was still quite good. The pork was well seasoned and tender, the chutney sweet with clear hints of ginger cutting through, the spinach a nice earthy undertone. This was just a good example of what I wish places like Caffe Frascati understood: A good sandwich isn’t hard, you just have to try. A little effort goes a long way, and at Big Word Cafe it went all the way to a delicious sandwich.

The Drippin’s – Poor House Bistro, S Autumn St, San Jose, CA

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I talked about the Poor House Bistro some time ago, and what I said then still stands. It’s a fine outpost, a respectable po’ boy in an area where such a thing isn’t in abundance. The reason I bring it up again is to draw a contrast to the Braised Onion French Dip featured on Monday. Both are very good sandwiches, both centered around a big pile of meat, but the things that accompany the Drippin’s are doing something very different than the French Dip from Oaks. Oaks had each ingredient trying to make its own mark: truffled watercress, sherry au jus and braised onions are all an ingredient plus an additional bit of spin. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it makes a sandwich significantly harder to balance; featuring six things is always going to be harder than featuring one thing.

Poor House Bistro takes a more simple approach, in which the support is the support. In addition to the roast pork the sandwich features tomatoes, pickles, shredded cabbage and mustard. That’s not the default “everything,” most sandwiches at Poor House Bistro include mayo by default, but they leave if off the Drippin’s, much to the sandwich’s benefit. Leaving the mayo off gives the cabbage a crisp freshness that pairs quite well with the richness of the pork. This isn’t a question of laziness, it’s just a matter of understanding the sandwich. You’re there for juicy, tender, savory, and just peppery enough pork, and that’s exactly what you get.

I have also tried the BBQ Shrimp Po’ Boy at Poor House Bistro, and it struck me as one of those sandwiches where if it’s your thing, you’ll love it, but if not there isn’t much appealing about it. It’s incredibly heavy on the pepper, and while I do enjoy spicy foods I felt like this was a bit much, one strong note without much support at all. If pepper is your thing, by all means. If you lack that enthusiasm, though, the Drippin’s or one of the fried numbers is likely to set you right.

Slow Roasted Pork — Four Cafe, Colorado Blvd., Los Angeles

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In sandwiches, as concerns most others things in life, it is not often necessary to try to gimmick up a sure-fire winner. If you must have your dalliances and whimsy, either work out your quirks in the comfort of your own home, or make your entire enterprise reflect that you are not to be taken seriously with regard to the art of the sandwich.

Four Cafe is a fine establishment, serving fresh fare with plenty of vegan and vegetarian options and with an eye toward healthful menu items. They have a seasonal menu and some of their winter offerings were quite spectacular indeed. Unfortunately, it is now spring, and they are featuring a pulled pork sandwich that does grave disservice to the genre.

Pulled pork, of course, is often married with citrus (specifically orange juice), utilized in a wide range of marinades and mojo sauces, etc. What Four Cafe has done here is to take pulled pork that has reportedly been through a whole grain mustard marinade, and create a sandwich consisting of red onions, gruyere, arugula, garlic aioli — and orange slices. The result, of course, is a nightmare on rye bread. To begin with, pulled pork should not be associated with any sort of cheese — that is strike one. The gruyere, as to be expected, was completely lost in the needlessly crowded (yet still startlingly slender) sandwich. Secondly, the pulled pork was layered so thin that there was nearly a 1:1 ratio of pork to oranges. The flavors of the sandwich (such as they were) were completely overwhelmed by entire orange slices (and if we are being honest, these were almost certainly sections of clementine, but I defer to the menu’s boast of oranges). Even if the pork were not completely overshadowed by the citrus (and I do not mean that as a compliment to the citrus), Four Cafe appears to be blissfully unaware that sections of orange (or whatever) are not what you would call “conducive” to inclusion in a sandwich. In fact, the rubbery, tough, and fibrous texture of the orange is at best an antithesis to the yielding nature of pulled pork. What you are left with is a sandwich that is difficult to eat, an insult to pulled pork, and really devoid of any distinguishable flavor or trait other than “oranges.”

You called it a “Slow Roasted Pork” sandwich, Four Cafe. Don’t hand me nothing but citrus and call it a day.

BBQ Pork – On A Roll, San Pedro Market, San Jose, CA

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There are two bits of context that are essential to understanding this sandwich. The first is that it cost $5, well above the average price for bánh mí in the south bay. Obviously prices are going to vary between neighborhoods, but $5 is steep even for downtown. The second thing you need to know is that my sandwich was the only order On A Roll was processing while I was there, and it still took them more time than is reasonable to make the sandwich. Having established those things, I would like to note what the sandwich did well. The BBQ pork was Xa Xíu, the kind of thing you find in pork fried rice, and it was sweet and moist. The Vietnamese mayo was also choice, a fine buttery example of the type. Both of those things were quite good. But sadly I cannot praise the sandwich as a whole, and here is why:

I draw your attention to the scant strings of carrot on the sandwich. What you see there is the full extent of it, there’s none buried under anything and of course I made no adjustments to the sandwich before photographing it. The daikon and jalapeño weren’t exactly plentiful, but I cannot get over that shortage of carrot. The bánh mí, as an archetype, is excuisitely balanced and included in that balance is a good deal of carrot. So why on earth would you leave it out? Carrots aren’t expensive, and even if they were, On a Roll is charging  almost double what many establishments charge. I know the profit margins in the food game are slim, but there’s got to be room in those margins for a bit more carrot. The only excuse I can think of is sloppy execution, as I’ve found at places doing booming business. But that hardly describes On a Roll, which means that as this sandwich was assembled, someone had the time to look down at it and decide whether or not this was a proper sandwich. It’s too bad, really, because On a Roll gets the hard part of the sandwich wrong. Lackluster execution is lackluster execution, though, and in this case there’s no excuse I can see for what went wrong.

Pork Awesomeness™ – Rookies Sports Lodge, Meridian Ave, San Jose, CA

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Rookies is the kind of establishment that serves a sandwiched named the Pork Awesomeness™ (the ™ is theirs, naturally, not mine.) The Pork Awesomeness™, in turn, is the kind of sandwich you find at a place like Rookies. You’ve all been to such an establishment. The walls boast all manner of decoration and sports paraphernalia, the wall behind the bar is covered in currency that’s been decorated by patrons, the beer comes in mugs the size of a small boot. Though this is not my preferred type of establishment, I do not offer this description as an insult. No bar ends up like this by accident; it is a cultivated image, a cultivated atmosphere, above all else it is deliberate. And, of course, the way that this deliberate effort manifests in sandwiches is via excess. A fair number of sandwiches come with the top half of the bread to the side, but very few of them will leave you at a loss as to how the come together. But that’s what I found at Rookies, as a pile of meat tilted away from two thick slices of toast. Two breaded and fried pork cutlets, a few slices of ham, a few slices of bacon, and a fried egg. Pork upon pork upon pork, with an egg. 

I was able to put together something resembling a sandwich, and for all of that the eating wasn’t tremendously difficult. That said, it wasn’t tremendously rewarding either. This connects to the point I made in the previous post, about harmony. Rather than unwelcome levels of contrast, what this sandwich presents is too many items working far too close together. All the flavors are playing on the roughly the same level, and that’s not a recipe for success. The sandwich wasn’t terrible, but it was flat. Dense and chewy, rich in fat and gaining even further richness from the fried egg, for all of its excess and LOOK AT ME attitude it was dull. It’s as if a six-piece band formed, only everyone plays the bass guitar and nothing but the bass guitar. That might make an interesting concert, but it almost certainly won’t make a good one.

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.

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.