A Tale Of Two (Huge) Sandwiches: Part The Second

A couple of weeks after eating the White House sandwiches I mentioned in the first part of this post, I found myself in Brooklyn on a weekday afternoon in need of lunch. On days like that, sometimes I'll make a trip out to DeFonte's in Red Hook. While I was disappointed to learn that the DeFonte's hot roast beef hero is not, in fact, the sandwich featured in the "Sandwich Day" episode of 30 Rock (and, note to self, go to Fiore's next time I'm in Hoboken), it remains well worth the trip.

On a couple of previous visits, I've ordered the aforementioned hot roast beef hero (with fried eggplant, fresh mozzarella and cooking juices from the roast beef, delicious) and taken it to eat in nearby Red Hook Park. However, on this particular day the weather was unpleasant, so my plan was to get a sandwich and bus it back to my apartment before digging in. I wasn't sure a hot sandwich was the best choice given the anticipated delay of about 30 minutes, so I decided to go with a Nicky's Special.

This delicious sandwich has ham, capicola, salami, fried eggplant, provolone, hot salad (more on this in a moment), marinated mushrooms, lettuce, tomato, oil and vinegar. Because the small size sandwich (on 1/3 loaf of italian bread, $10) is too much food for one meal, but not enough for two, I decided to order the large size (on 1/2 loaf of italian bread, $12) and be sure to get two solid meals out of it. I'm afraid to say that the picture I took doesn't remotely do this sandwich justice, but take a look anyway:



If you're curious, there are better pictures on the web if you do a Google image search for "defonte's nicky special". You can't really tell from my picture, but half of the large sandwich is so much food that I wasn't hungry for dinner both days when I had the sandwich for lunch.

The hot salad is really what knocks this sandwich out of the park. Mixed spicy vegetables (probably marinated in a vinegar/peppers mix) provide some bite to cut the richness of the meat and the cheese and the fried eggplant. The only "problem", if it can be called that, is that the bread was stuffed so full of good ingredients that the hot salad tended to fall off the top, but this is still way preferable to a sandwich that's all bread. Highly recommended (as is the hot roast beef sandwich I mentioned above), and note that if you want to give it a try but don't frequent South Brooklyn, they recently opened a satellite location in Manhattan at 21st and 3rd.

A Tale Of Two (Huge) Sandwiches: Part The First

You know what's good? Sandwiches. Sure, a fancy meal is awesome every now and then, but sandwiches are delicious and filling and generally quite affordable. Honestly, I think the greatness of sandwiches is so universally acknowledged that I don't even need to say anything more on the subject.

A few weeks ago I found myself in Atlantic City for the 2011 ECAC Men's Hockey Tournament. The outcome of the games... well, we don't really need to talk about that. But I was happy to be down there because it gave me an opportunity to try out the White House Sub Shop. If you're not familiar with it, the White House is a famous deli not far from Trump Plaza (which, by the way, has free self-parking just a couple of blocks away) that's been turning out huge, awesome, cheap sandwiches for decades, and has the yellowed celebrity photos on the wall to prove it. You can't read a review of the White House without hearing stories of how people stop there on the way out of town to buy a bunch of sandwiches to take home, or have them delivered by courier, or how Frank Sinatra reportedly had a bunch shipped to his movie sets. So, I had to give it a try.

I had read stories of people waiting in line for an hour or more at the White House, but my arrival was conveniently in the lull between lunch and dinner and there were only a couple of people in line ahead of me. Once my number was called, I gave my order to the sandwich-maker (who called me "Chris" because apparently I look like a guy named Chris): a half tuna and a half White House Special. My plan was to eat the tuna for a late lunch/early dinner, and the Special (salami, ham, provolone, capicola) as a snack on my ride home later that night. It should be noted here that a half is on a half a loaf of bread - about a foot long, still a big sandwich. The tab for both sandwiches came in at around $14. I took my sandwiches to a little park across the street and dug in. Here's a picture of the tuna sandwich:



Or, let's be more precise: this is HALF of a half tuna sub, after I had devoured the first half before it occurred to me to take a picture. Note 20 ounce soda bottle shown in the background for perspective. You get a lot of sandwich for $7. The bread was fresh and awesome, and actually sturdy enough to basically hold all the ingredients; the tuna was chunky and tasty and not overly mayonnaise-y; the tomatoes were fresh; the onions and oil and vinegar gave it some kick; the lettuce... was lettuce. This was a delicious sandwich, and big enough that I couldn't finish it. (Without any chips on the side or anything, either.) Stashed the other sandwich in the trunk of the car (so the inside wouldn't smell like meat for days afterward), went to the game.

Well, I think the picture of the first sandwich demonstrates the flaw in my plan: these sandwiches are way too big to eat while driving. As a result, I wound up making my way back to the Parkway and pulling off at the first rest area I found, only a couple of miles up from the Atlantic City Expressway, to pick up a bottle of water and go to town on that bad boy. Unfortunately, because I was eating in the car (sorry Mom), I wasn't able to take a picture of the Special, so I'm borrowing these, with credit to Always Hungry New York:



In addition to the great bread and the delicious meats and cheese and lettuce and tomato and onion, note the hot pepper relish on top. That stuff was a particular highlight, definitely something that sets sandwiches from the White House apart from what you might find elsewhere. Because I wasn't all that hungry after eating the tuna sub earlier, I ate half of the Special and brought the rest home for my father to enjoy (and also out of guilt since I had made a sandwich with the last of the roast beef for lunch earlier in the day).

Incredible sandwiches. Just thinking about them makes me want to go have lunch right now. If you ever find yourself in Atlantic City, you should definitely make a stop. I'm told their cheesesteaks and meatball subs are excellent as well. (NB: They also have a location set to open in the Trump Taj Mahal sometime within the next couple of weeks.)

Part 2 soon to come...

Behold the Power of Trends, and a LONG Tangent

This post was supposed to include some nice pictures of last Friday's dinner. (OK, it still could, for reasons I'll discuss below, but bear with me for the moment.) On Friday evening, after work, I met up with my sister Lauren and my brother-in-law Brian to have dinner at The Meatball Shop, a fairly new (opened in February) and significantly buzzed-about Lower East Side restaurant specializing in (no points for guessing this one) meatballs. The menu includes five different kinds of meatballs (beef, pork, chicken, veggie, and a weekly special), and you can order any one of the types in a variety of ways including a variety of different types of sandwiches or a la carte, as well as various sides and beverages and all that.

So, of course, meatballs are delicious, and we decided we wanted to give it a try. The reviews mentioned that there could be a long wait for a table, but we figured that we could always put our name down, leave a phone number, and then go get a drink at a bar nearby. But when we arrived, we were told that the wait would be a whopping two hours! OK, really, come on. I'm sure these meatballs are very good, but are they really that much better than what you get on a meatball sub at your local pizza place (my coworkers and I sometimes go to Liberatos Pizza in the Financial District) that that kind of a wait is justified? I mean, I'm not averse to waiting a reasonable amount of time for food. 45 minutes in the park waiting for my burger from Shake Shack? No big deal. Line outside Tomoe Sushi? I haven't been there yet, but everyone says it's worth the wait. But two hours for meatballs? Well, we didn't think they could possibly be worth the wait, and decided to head somewhere else.

After a bit of wandering, we wound up at a cute little place called The Pink Pony and decided to give it a try. (It didn't hurt that they had a sign saying "we have air conditioning!" and it was really hot outside.) Lauren ordered a nicoise salad, Brian ordered short ribs, which both looked very good. (Brian loves short ribs, so there wasn't much doubt that he'd be happy, and the tuna in Lauren's salad was nicely seared.)

I ordered cassoulet, which I'd never eaten before, but had been meaning to try for a while because: So after I took the bar exam back in the summer of 2006, I took a vacation to Europe for a few weeks. One travel day, when I was taking a TGV train from Bordeaux to Barcelona (or, technically, to Narbonne to transfer to a different train to Barcelona), I got, well, stranded. The train just stopped working with no explanation. (Well, there might have been some explanation, but not an explanation that I was going to be able to pick up on with my "Ou est la toilette?"-level understanding of French.) At first we were just stopped basically in a field, but after being held there for something like an hour we pulled forward at a slow speed until we arrived at the nearest station, in a small town named Castelnaudary. There we sat for... a few hours, as I recall. I still didn't really know what was going on, only that it was starting to look more and more like I was going to miss my connection. They were letting people off the train, though, so I got up to stretch my legs and eventually found out, from an English-speaking conductor (SNCF conductors wear little national flag pins representing various languages they speak, which I thought was clever), that there was some sort of electrical problem, that they didn't know how long it would be, but that they would make sure that everyone did get where they were going if we missed connections. (I later learned that all the electricity in southwestern France was not working that afternoon; I'm not sure whether that meant just for SNCF, or for everyone in the whole region.) I managed to call my hotel in Barcelona to let them know that I would be arriving late that night (the Spanish that I had learned in high school and college was, and still is, rusty but at least somewhat functional), and then settled in to wait. I couldn't really go anywhere, though, because there was no telling when the train would be ready to leave, and in any case I couldn't really communicate with anyone to figure out where I'd go even if I could go somewhere. The train eventually left Castelnaudary a few hours later and arrived in Narbonne close to midnight, something like five or six hours after I was supposed to make my transfer. SNCF, true to their word, put me and a bunch of other Barcelona-bound travelers onto a bus that eventually arrived at around 3 in the morning, and someone at my hotel (formerly Hostal Palacios, now Hotel Praktik Rambla, highly recommended) was there to let me in even at that late hour.

Aaaaaanyway, if you'll forgive the rambling (though this is all actually part of a much longer story that I'm certainly not going to go to the effort to type), the connection is: after I got home at the end of my trip, I decided to read up on Castelnaudary, where I had been stranded for a couple of hours. It turned out that what seemed to me to be a crappy little town in the middle of nowhere (to be fair, not many places look particularly nice if all you see is the train station) was actually a lovely town along the Canal du Midi that bills itself as the "World Capital of Cassoulet." Had I known this at the time, I would've certainly tried to find a place to eat cassoulet rather than whatever crap I found in a vending machine at the train station, but since I didn't, I've been meaning to try it for a while, and now here we are back at where we started.

So, cassoulet. Tasty. Beany. Should've taken pictures, like I mentioned above. I think I'm going to need to try it elsewhere for comparison.

The end? Perhaps, though I do still want to go try those meatballs some night when the line isn't so long.

Well Hello There

Sorry for the lack of posts lately; I'm sure there will be more forthcoming soon, if I can just remember to take pictures and actually write about things. One thing that can definitely be filed under "coming soon" is the garden out back by the verandah (read: planter on my fire escape).

In the meantime, the always-excellent Ted Berg of SNY takes some time out from his normal sportswriting to bring us Sandwich Week. It's not my own material, obviously (save for a few comments to Ted's posts), but worth a read nonetheless if you like sandwiches. (And who doesn't like sandwiches? You don't like sandwiches? What's wrong with you? You know who didn't like sandwiches? Hitler. Think about it.) Check out his posts on:

the Chacarero Completo at Barros Luco, 300 1/2 East 52nd Street
Ted's own homemade Cuban sandwich
the Sloppy Bao at Baoguette, various locations around the city

And stay tuned for what I assume will be several more sandwich posts, assuming Sandwich Week is accurately named.