'Wich Doctor

Three stops in and I'll say it out loud: this isn't really about sandwiches.

Which is an odd thing to admit on a site that scores sandwiches out of 50. We do score them. I take it more seriously than is healthy. But the sandwich is the excuse, and Stop 03 is where that got too obvious to keep pretending.

Three things made this one different. None of them was the food.

The first thing, which is on me

Shay wasn't there.

Shay has been at every stop of this thing since the beginning. He wrecked his car a couple of weeks ago, and when I put this one together I had no idea he was going to be in the Oakley area that day. I sent a Slack message. He was sitting in a meeting that had food provided, so he never answered it, and I took the silence for a no and went ahead.

So the guy this whole ritual started with got left out of the biggest table it has ever had. Inclusion is the entire point here. I whiffed it. I'd rather write that down than quietly leave it out of the post.

The second thing is that there were four of us — Kevin, Sarah, Becky, me. Every stop before this was a two-top. That's a conversation. Four is a table.

The third is that we never sat down in the shop. I picked the order up in Newport and drove it to where everybody already was. So the table wasn't a place we went to. It was a place we made, on whatever surface was closest.

Newport is in Kentucky, by the way. This is a Cincinnati sandwich tour and I'm counting it. A river is a geographic feature, not a moral one.

The sandwiches

The Angry Bird is the one. Buffalo chicken, cheese, real heat that isn't a dare. And it's wet — sloppy in the load-bearing sense, where the sauce and the cheese have stopped being separate things. Get it. Bring napkins you don't care about. 4.5 loaves.

The Reuben is the best-built thing on the table, and it isn't close. 4 loaves.

The Cuban came out pressed flat, which is not a complaint. It's a plancha sandwich. Flattening it is the job, and they did that right. What they got wrong was the dressing — the condiments never reached the ends. First two bites, no mustard, no pickle. On a Cuban that's the whole argument of the sandwich missing from its opening statement. 3 loaves, all of it for the dressing and none for the press.

The Turkey Muffuletta looks incredible, distinct layers all the way down. Somebody also bit down on something hard in the olive salad.

For what it's worth, I think it was a sliver rather than an actual pit, and the reaction may have run a step or two ahead of the evidence. Still worth a look back there. That's all I'll say about it.

Now the bread, because I owe them this one. We ate these twenty minutes and one river from the kitchen. Toasty edges don't travel. Seal a hot Reuben in a clamshell and the steam goes into the bread, and the crust you paid for is gone before you ever see it. Kevin has had this same sandwich fresh and puts that bread at an 8 or a 9. I believe him. What happened in between was me, and a car.

So the bread gets a 7. Higher than what reached us, lower than what left them. Docking a shop for my own logistics isn't scoring the shop.

Sides, quickly. The potato salad has no hard-boiled egg in it, and no celery either, and Becky was not okay with that. The egg especially. Her other note was that a few of the potatoes should have been firmer than they were, which is a polite way of saying they went soft. She measured the whole thing against her mother-in-law Leslie Blank's potato salad, which is the gold standard at that table and a bar nothing has ever cleared. The vinegar slaw is sweet and sharp; dig toward the bottom where the dressing has pooled. The bean salad has good flavor and too much oil. And Kevin would like it on the record that green beans are garbage and should not be served at all, to anyone, ever.

The part that mattered

Alright. That's the food.

Somewhere between the Reuben and the potato salad I asked the table the death row question. You know the one. Tomorrow is it, one plate, no budget, no second chances — what are you ordering?

It sounds like a party game. It isn't. Nobody answers it with a restaurant.

Kevin said his grandmother's meatballs. Homemade, the way she made them, and he did not entertain follow-up questions.

Sarah said a Connecticut lobster roll. Warm, butter, no mayo, and she defended the no-mayo part like somebody who has had the argument before.

Becky said a tomahawk pork chop she had in Greece, ribs still on, because the meat closest to the bone is the point.

Then it went where food talk goes, which is straight at the worst thing that ever happened to you involving a smell. Kevin once brought Reuben-flavored sausages home from a Kroger in Sidney while Sarah was pregnant, and by his own account the smell alone got divorce put on the table. Sarah came back with first-trimester prosciutto hitting a hot pan, which she described using the words demon and fireball. I'm not going to improve on that.

You don't get any of this on a video call. It shows up when everybody has food in front of them and nowhere else to be.

Becky closed it out by saying she walked in, saw her favorite people already sitting together, and it made her whole day. The table gave the company a flat 10. Nobody argued.

Real work got done at that table too. The specific, numbers-attached kind that usually needs a conference room and forty minutes of throat-clearing before anybody says the actual thing. It surfaced between bites instead, because nobody was performing. The specifics stay at the table, same as always. What travels is that it happened at all, with no agenda in the room.

The score

Bread 7, Build 9, Mess 9, Value 10, Talk 10. 45 out of 50. Top of the board, two clear of Danny Boy and J & W.

The Value 10 comes with a disclosure: the Angry Bird was comped. That helps the number and you should know it.

And honestly, I put a thumb on this one. Not on the food — on the framing. My first pass at this post scored the shop on sandwiches that had been sitting in a clamshell for twenty minutes and called that objectivity. It wasn't. It was me grading a kitchen for my own decision to eat lunch a county away.

Best sandwich we have eaten on this tour. Also the best table, though 'Wich Doctor only gets partial credit for that one.

Go to Newport. Order the Angry Bird. Eat it in the shop if you have any sense. And if you do what I did instead and carry it across a river to people you'd rather be sitting with, that's a fine trade. Just know you're making it.

It was worth it.

Next time I'm calling Shay, not Slacking him.

On to Stop 04.

— Filed for breadandbutter.wtf