You’re starving. You’ve been out all morning, you skipped breakfast, it’s past lunchtime–you need a sandwich. You walk into a local sandwich shop. It’s not Subway, so it might not end up in the gutter. You peruse the menu. Exhausted, you identify a sandwich with the meats, cheeses, and additional elements you enjoy. Breathlessly, ready to collapse from hunger, you order your sandwich. The employee pulls out a hoagie roll. It’s thick. You’re concerned about bread-to-filling proportionality, but you hold your comments. Let the artist work. She slices it through the middle, creating two long halves connected along the side. She left a significant amount of bread connected on the side. You grow concerned. Some bites will be mostly bread, even if she vertically thins the top and bottom by manually digging out excess starch. She spreads the hoagie so it lays open, the top and bottom on the counter, the insides facing up. She begins to lay your meat on the sandwich. You grimace. She places the meat centered directly on the fold, and the meat doesn’t reach either edge. You know where this is headed. She does the same with your cheese. Same issue. You begin to panic. She layers your toppings and other preferred elements directly on top of the meat and cheese, again centered on the FOLD of the hoagie. You’re apoplectic. You’re about to collapse. You know exactly what’s coming. You try to speak–try to advise on the very simple adjustments to properly construct that sandwich–but your exhaustion and frustration overwhelm you. She glances up, thinking she heard you mutter, but you can’t get the words out. She places one hand under the top of the bread and one under the bottom. She folds the overstuffed hoagie in on itself. She rolls the sandwich over. Tears are streaming down your face, sobbing uncontrollably, because you see the monstrosity she (and, through certain transitive properties, you) wrought. There is a too-thick layer of bread down the side, a rolled log of meat down the center, and a smushed cylinder of toppings down the other side, spilling out of the sandwich. Dejected and afraid, you shake your head wildly, and with the sadness of a man who fears he’ll never eat again, you sprint out of the sandwich shop, shaken, forlorn, and still starving.
If you live on planet Earth and eat sandwiches, you’ve experienced this and countless other sandwich construction abominations. Ingredient ratios are off. The ingredients are flavorless or otherwise suck. Honestly, the permutations on disappointing sandwiches are countless. But fortunately, there is one sandwich shop where you KNOW, unequivocally, you are getting an absolutely perfectly proportioned and flavorful sandwich on outrageous homemade bread–its Bay Boy Specialty Sandwiches, it’s in West Plaza, and if it ever went away, I’d sob a thousand times harder than our hypothetical hungry man above.
The sandwich pictured above is a pastrami sandwich. I ate it for lunch yesterday. It has pastrami, crunchy pickles, swiss cheese, and horseradish. The bread is homemade, and imparts texture (the top gets ever-so crunchy while the bread remains soft) as well as significant flavor. This is a perfectly proportioned, flavorful, and balanced sandwich. The only drawback is they don’t make their own pastrami, which is a little surprising because they DO make many other ingredients in-house, even beyond the bread (e.g., the house-made kimchi in the delightfully heavy and guilty-pleasure delicious KimCheese grilled cheese sandwich). But it’s an excellent sandwich nevertheless.
Here is another sandwich. It has roast beef, I believe cheddar, horseradish, and a sweet and tangy raspberry jam. Again, the sandwich is explosively flavorful and perfectly proportioned.
They also have a rotating special menu, which currently has a pimento cheese (made in-house) sandwich, and previously had my all-time favorite Bay Boy Sandwich – the Hawaiian Hammer, which was highlighted by smoked ham, pineapple, and poblano. Hard to go wrong here.
So this is where you should eat sandwiches! Local Pig/Pigwich is another. Pickleman’s is a step up from Subway but not by much, so that is not a place where you should eat sandwiches. So hit up Bay Boy, you won’t regret it!