Tag Archives: Reviews by Pete

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.

Slummin’ It – All American Patty Melt, Red Robin

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.

Chicken Aïoli – Wolfgang Puck Bistro, Logan International Airport, Boston, MA

Posted on by

There’s always a question of how much context is relevant to the overall sandwich, as I relate it to you. No sandwich exists in a vacuum, and try as we might there are things that have an impact on how we feel about a sandwich that are not the sandwich itself. Price, restaurant quality and cleanliness, reputation, all of these and more influence expectations, which in turn influence how a sandwich is received. The reason I raise this point now is that I’m uncertain whether this was a good sandwich, or a good sandwich for an airport. I wasn’t in the best of ways when I ate this, I was in the middle of a journey home, the sky was a uniformly dull grey, I was worn out after a fruitful vacation, and possessed with the irritability developed by any sensible person who finds themselves in an airport. So it seems reasonable to me that I might get a halfway decent sandwich in an airport and be so soothed that I rate it much higher than it deserves. At the same time, I don’t want to hand this sandwich an unfair discount. It’s a tough call, but I think I can say with some degree of certainty that this was a good sandwich, full stop. Moist chicken, flavorful bread, fresh romaine, tomatoes, red onion and cheese. The cilantro aioli gave things a smooth cilantro flavor, neither overpowering nor being overpowered. It was certainly the best sandwich I’ve had in an airport, and one I think  I would be pleased to have on a warm afternoon in a more pleasing environment.

Croissant Sandwiches – Le Boulanger & Manley’s Donuts, San Jose, CA

Posted on by

Scrambled eggs, chopped bacon, and cheddar cheese on a croissant. It’s simple, and it would be far too easy to simply inhale one early in the morning and never think twice about it. There’s a lot going on there, though. A tender, flaky croissant. Fluffy eggs. Crispy bacon.  Cheese. The risk of this negligence of attention seems highest at breakfast, I think. The breakfast sandwich is one that is rarely a respite from something else; when one sits down for lunch or supper one is often trying to unwind, taking a short solace in simple pleasures. At breakfast your’re gearing up, considering the day that lies ahead, and as a result your sandwich may get scant attention. In this case, I was at the airport, taking in an early sandwich before I started an extended vacation. I can’t honestly tell you that I gave this sandwich what it was due.

That sort of mindless eating is unfortunate, but the alternative can be even worse. Such was the case with the similar sandwich I got from Manley’s Donuts, also scrambled eggs and bacon on a croissant. My mind may have started to drift, but this sandwich wasn’t having it. The labor required to dispatch tough, chewy bacon functioned as a sort of preliminary roadblock, and the dense, greasy croissant only slowed things further. This compounds the earlier sin, I suppose. The good sandwiches run the risk of passing hardly noticed, but the bad ones refuse to be ignored. In both cases, a sort of lack of effort undermines the whole thing; either you drift away or else you are put upon. I put it to you that true enthusiasm, sandwich or otherwise, requires effort. It requires a certain focus. Don’t we owe that to ourselves? Don’t we owe that to our sandwiches? In instances such as the sandwich from Le Boulanger, such effort pays off in the experience of a very good sandwich. In instances such as Manley’s Donuts, well…take it as a learning experience. The next time I approach the heights of some fine sandwich, I’ll take a brief moment to remember the greasy depths of Manley’s Donuts. There’s no reason to seek out bad sandwiches, but there’s also no reason to let one go to waste.

Canter’s Reuben & Eddie Cantor’s Delight – Canter’s Deli, S Las Vegas Blvd, Las Vegas, NV

Posted on by

Canter’s, a delicatessen based in Los Angeles and about which I have previously spoken, operates an outpost in Las Vegas’ Treasure Island Casino. While in town sometime back, I made it a point to stop by to see how the sandwiches on offer stacked up against the ones in Los Angeles. The Reuben, I am happy to report, remains a song of the heart, a pile of deliciously salty pastrami and moist sauerkraut. The sandwich itself is just as good, but, as you might expect, the atmosphere is a bit lacking. The Canter’s in Las Vegas is just stuck in a corner of the gaming floor, the floor’s jarring shift from hectic carpet to checked tile making it appear exactly what it is, a secondary appendage, an afterthought. It suffers from that permadusk that so pervades any and all casinos, you order from one window and grab your food from another, and there’s no one to top up your supply of pickles. In short, it lacks charm in just about every way something can lack charm. But it’s in an area that’s light on really high-quality sandwiches, so it’s still well worth your time.

The same cannot be said, sadly, of all of the sandwiches. The Eddie Cantor’s Delight, for example, is an ostentatious number that would be a towering failure if they even bothered to stand it up. Stages Deli, another venerable institution prone to missing the mark, at least made a display of their sandwich. Compounding the sin that is serving a sandwich with a fork, the Cantor’s Delight comes lying prone, having already surrendered to its faults. It’s not that you can’t pick it up, turn it right side up and go at it, it’s that they’re telling you you need to. The combination of pastrami, corned beef, turkey, ham and swiss cheese isn’t a terrible idea, and they’re even basically in proper proportion, but the sheer size of it renders the whole thing nearly useless. There’s no way to attack it that gets everything at once, and so you’re really left eating a couple of different sandwiches, a bite from one then a bite from the other. There’s a time and a place for that, but it isn’t when you’ve ordered a single sandwich. Eddie Cantor surely made quite a mark in the world of music, and it’s a good thing he did. His contributions to the world of sandwiches aren’t worth two dimes, be they marching or not.

French Bull – Bagel Maven, 7th Ave, New York, NY

Posted on by

I’m always given a bit of pause when going for a sandwich at an establishment named for some other food. Plenty of such establishments offer fine sandwiches, but it’s always cause for the tiniest bit of suspicion. I should have trusted my instincts. The French Bull at Bagel Maven is roast beef, brie and watercress on ciabatta bread. Mayonnaise and horseradish round things out. That’s well and good in concept, but in execution there was much too much cheese. Believe it or not, what you see above is merely half of what was intended for the sandwich, and I actually broke with my own policy and offered instruction to the man assembling things. Watching it being made, I saw the pictured amount of cheese added and then saw the sandwich maker reach for anther handful. I found myself unable to hold my tongue. “That’s enough cheese,” I called, and the woman behind me wondered aloud just how much he had intended to add. That will forever remain a mystery, but I do know that so long as I was shouting instructions I should have called for some subtraction. The beef and the cheese are there in almost equal parts, which is hopelessly out of balance. The horseradish was completely lost, something that happens a lot more frequently than I would prefer. In more fitting proportions I think this would have been a fine sandwich, but as I received it it was no good. Balance is delicate, tremendously delicate, and it’s all too easy for one element to derail a sandwich. Any serious sandwich enthusiast knows this, which makes it all the more a shame that so many establishments seem so set on reminding us.