Simply Sandwiches

Walking in you get the distinct feeling that Switch Pressed Sandwiches (104 8th ave, between 15th and 16th St.) certainly has it’s niche down. Everything is green and white (even the CPR poster), plastic and glass, obscenely bathed in bright incandescent light from the ceiling. It’s not exactly cozy, but if you like curved plastic modern design or enjoy feeling like you’re in the future, it’s great. I thought I was in some kind of sandwich-clean room where sandwiches were constructed with the utmost precision, which made me really hungry. Anyhow, the design is very striking, love it or hate it.

Though the place is named “Switch Pressed Sandwiches”, they just had to make room on the menu for some salads (or as they call them ‘deconstructed sandwiches’). Thankfully there are way more sandwiches than salads, 16 to 5, take THAT salad-eaters! Each sandwich has a cute name; for example, a buffalo chicken sandwich is called “buffalo hot pants” and a tuna sandwich is called “tuna-na-na” (and a cuban is called a “cuban”). As much as it sounds pretentious, I always think it’s cute when a sandwich place re-names their sandwiches as long as you can still tell what’s in it (and they’re not named after landmarks or celebrities). Tuna-na-na, that’s real sandwich love, well, almost.

Unfortunately, the sandwiches weren’t that great. They’re all pressed, surprise surprise, which makes some crunchy and some warm and toasted. The real problem is that they’ve got a lot of fancy-pants ingredients, but they’re not proportioned correctly. The “Buffalo Hot Pants” ($7.95, grilled chicken “smothered” in buffalo sauce with blue cheese on french) and it just tasted like dry chicken with a slight sprinkling of hot sauce and two little crumbles of blue cheese. “Smothered” it was not! The “Trojan Horse” ($8.75, ground lamb, tomato, tzatziki and mint on focaccia) was better for a few bites, just until I realized that I could barely taste anything over the tzatziki and that there was no mint to be found. Look at the picture, that little green speck, is the mint! How sad. It’s almost as though they have a great exec. chef, but can’t teach the line cooks how to properly make their ‘wiches.

The real shame about Switch is that they have some good recipes, they’re just very poorly executed. I’ve made lamb-burgers with mint and feta and they’re fantastic, the flavors really sing together. As much as I want Switch to be a rockstar, it’s just another wannabe ‘wichcraft.

They shoot hight, but can’t seem to follow through:

No-Buffalo-Sauce Pants:

Nicely Grilled Foccica on the Outside:

And inside, an army of Tzatziki!

They give everyone an adorable little container of peas. It was too cute to pass up: