What We Talk About When We Talk About Sandwiches

LRoy plays the kid card. Forced to eat at Katz’s AGAIN.

“Some might say it’s a tourist trap. Some may say it’s overpriced ($20 for a pastrami on rye). Or too crowded. Or whatever. But when it’s all my carnivorous boy can talk about for weeks in advance, whaddya going to do?”

“With fries that match the ‘wiches in quality and healthy eating, and Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry and Cream sodas to wash ’em down, Katz’s really is a destination worth every bit of effort. On a rainy Xmas Eve Eve, picked up Dirty Uncle Bob, got a spot right out front, waited no more than ten minutes, got a good table, and chowed most mightily. So what are you complaining about already?!

Love the people too. All good. Can’t wait to go back.”

Dopamine Bump Anyone?

From My-Main-Sandwich-Man in Boston, LRoy:

Want to stir up a ruckus? Put together a list of the top any-number of any-thing.  You really want to start a flame war, pick the top sandwiches in New York!

Here’s a list which is making me drool though I just had dinner. Some of these look easy to agree with (and no matter what, I always include Katz’s pastrami), but others – broccoli classic?

I hear ya about the broccoli thingamabob. People talk about it though – the thing at No. 7 Sub. It takes skill to get a broccoli sub on any list other than Best Broccoli Subs.

So many sandwiches…

The 13 Best Sandwiches in NYC

Alidoro

Katz’s

Spoken Through Lips Greased By Pastrami

From MMSMINYJAF (My-Main-Sandwich-Man-in-NY, JAF) who has his fingers on the pulse of pastrami. At Katz’s Delicatessen the pulse is hoppin’! Bauer and Dean Publishers have gotten the sacred word from the whispering pickles.

The pictures in this tome are almost as nice as the ones I took when there with MMSMINY a few years ago.

Photographs by Baldomero Fernandez, text by Jake Dell, edited by Beth Daugherty

A Love Supreme

My Main Sandwich Man in NYC, JAF, sent me this story about 125-year-old Katz’s. JAF and I have been friends for 38 years, just 87 years shy of Katz’s age, a mere blink of a loving eye.

More and more I think about endurance and the passing of time. A note received about a month ago, as warm and affectionate as ever, from my demonstrative dad, pierced me so sharply that my heart staccatoed.  Getting dressed for yet another funeral my father, who is 88, wrote, “I am running out of friends.”

That day will come – is coming – for me, as well. My family is blessed (I do not know another word for blessed and wish I did) with longevity, a good fortune that comes with heartaches. Heartaches none of us would trade for mountains of cash or lavishes of love.

Endurance – in life, in love – is a gift supreme.

“I’m from out of town, and I like a good pastrami sandwich,” said Jeffrey A. Devore, a lawyer from West Palm Beach, Fla., who was sitting in Katz’s, the Lower East Side delicatessen that, like the neighborhood itself, has become a study in contrasts.

Mr. Devore had driven into Manhattan in his rental car after a court hearing in Newark and had taken a seat amid what a critic once described as the “terrazzo-and-Formica ambience, with a cafeteria counter along one side and signs instructing you, as of yore, to ‘Send a salami to your boy in the Army.’”

Read on here.