Highland Square Deli

I've lived in Fort Thomas since 2008, give or take. Highland Square Deli is up on Highland Avenue, a few minutes from my house, and until a few months ago I had never once walked in. It's changed names at least once over the years, which is my excuse, and it's a bad one.

Since somebody finally introduced me to it, I've been in a handful of times in the last month, and it's been great every time. Now every time I walk in, I bump into two or three people I know from town. I've been missing out all this time.

So this week I brought Shay.

The order was the Classic Club and the Hot Italian, plus the potato salad and the broccoli and cauliflower salad. That last one is one of their premium sides and I'd never tried it. For science.

The Classic Club is turkey, ham, swiss, bacon, spring mix, tomato and mayo on white toast. Nothing fancy. It's a club. But the bacon is crispy, the meat tastes great, and the bread is soft without falling apart. That last part matters, because I was here a week earlier with a friend whose sandwich came on the pretzel bun, and it basically collapsed and sank. This one held. Shay called it solid, well built, not messy. Then he said the thing that sealed it for him was the mayo. You can taste it, and it's good. We spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out whether it was Hellmann's or homemade (probably Hellmann's) and whether Duke's is overrated. Shay says Duke's is good but not what people make it out to be. I say it's the American cousin of Kewpie. We did not settle this.

The Hot Italian is genoa salami, ham, pepperoni and provolone with banana peppers, red onion, spring mix, Italian dressing and oregano on a toasted baguette. The banana peppers taste like they didn't come out of a jar, which is a funny thing to say about a pickled pepper. They're potent and vinegary in the best way. The pepperoni has a little heat. And the sandwich leaks some kind of juice that Shay rated ten out of ten on its own. Oil and vinegar, probably, plus whatever is running off those peppers. It's wet, but it isn't soggy, and that's high praise.

Now the sides. The potato salad split the table. Shay called it one of the worst potato salads we've had, and then immediately said it was good, just not great, which is very Shay. I liked it more than he did. It's got that sweet-relish, sweet-pickle flavor. It's also very creamy. Saucy, even, for a potato salad.

The broccoli and cauliflower salad, on the other hand, is absolutely excellent. Shay's word was "gas." Dried cranberries, a little bacon, and the cauliflower is chopped down to about the size of a pebble. Somebody put real work into that. It isn't bitter at all, which is usually where this kind of salad goes wrong. Get it. It's four bucks.

The card

Bread: 8. Both breads were good and neither one fell apart. The Italian's baguette got wet and stayed together. On the club, Shay wanted something a little more special, ciabatta or sourdough, and said he'd have gone nine for it. My view is that white toast is exactly right for a traditional American club. Shay agreed it's on brand. He still went eight.

Build: 9. Held together perfectly, both of them. Easy call.

Mess: 9. The Italian drips, and that's the only mark against it. Neither sandwich tried to leave the bread.

Value: 9. Eleven fifty for the club, twelve fifty for the Italian, and both come with chips. The potato salad is $3.25 and the broccoli and cauliflower salad is $3.85. Call it thirty-one bucks for two lunches and two sides. That is a lot of lunch for the money.

Talk: 10. As always.

We also went off-rubric and argued about flavor. Shay had it at eight. He said these weren't the most flavorful sandwiches we've had, and that's fair, because we've had some great ones. I pushed back, mostly on behalf of the club, and we met at eight and a half. It isn't on the card. I just wanted it on the record.

The other part

I opened lunch with an apology, which is not how I usually open lunch.

A few days earlier I got frustrated with a comment in one of our leadership threads, decided it was aimed at me, and reacted badly. Then I walked into all-hands still mad and poked at it some more. It was passive-aggressive and I'm not proud of it. What I should have done was say, right then, "Hey, if that was meant for me, I don't think it's appropriate." Instead I stewed.

Shay apologized too, which I didn't expect. The comment wasn't about me. It was a general thing he's done himself, and he could see how it landed wrong. So that's that. Water under the bridge, as he put it.

The real reason I was so wound up has nothing to do with Shay. August, September and October are the most logistically insane stretch of my year. I'm running most of the family logistics solo right now and I've been in a mode where I feel like I'm pushing on everything and nothing's moving. That isn't an excuse, but it's the truth.

Then we got to the fun part. I've been building a pocket recorder. It's a Raspberry Pi with a tiny ESP32 board on it that handles the power, so one button turns the whole thing on and off, starts a recording, and stops it. When I get home, it syncs the audio to my Mac Mini over Tailscale, and a script there transcribes it with a local Whisper model. Nothing leaves my network. It works. Shay asked me to score it, and I'll say I hit the MVP. It still needs an enclosure, and right now it only knows my home Wi-Fi, so it'll record anywhere but it won't sync until I get back. Shay thinks Bluetooth could be the config channel. He's probably right. I've also done so much soldering in the last two weeks that I'm over it, and I still don't own a magnifying glass.

It's the centerpiece of a forty-five-minute talk I'm giving soon. I've been through three different ways to tell the story, I finally know which one it is, and I have about fifty slides to build. Shay's advice was to bring it on stage and hit record at the end. That's the plan.

Highland Square. Get the club, add the broccoli and cauliflower salad, and don't let fifteen years go by like I did.

On to Stop 08.

— Filed for breadandbutter.wtf