BB’s wins the award for most-focused sandwich shop. Their menu has only one thing on it: cheesesteaks. I love this kind of focus! They also sell sodas and chips, but those must be there just to placate vegetarian friends of steak lovers. BB’s is tucked in a little shop that it shares with a cupcake store. How bizarre? Maybe the cupcakes are for the vegetarian friends? Seems like it’d be better to share the store with a cap store, or a knife store or something more manly like a WWE wrestling ring.

BB’s cheesesteaks ($5) are a bit different. Most cheesesteaks are served on a long roll, sliced lengthwise and stuffed with grilled steak and cheese whiz. Real cheese, onions and mushrooms are optional. BB’s cheesesteak is served on a kaiser roll with american cheese, onions and some kind of magic sauce. In most cheesesteaks, the meat and cheese flavor is all there is and it’s completely overpowering. In BB’s you get a lot of other flavors. There’s not nearly as much meat as usual can you can barely taste the cheese since it’s a tiny little sliver melted into the huge roll. The secret sauce loses some of it’s allure when you discover it tastes like ketchup. Most cheesesteaks are so big you want to plant your face in the second half and take a nap. Not BB’s, these are normal sized and you can get up and keep walking around the west village afterward, looking for old LPs, “tobacco use only” pipes, or fingerless gloves, because that’s all they have for sale. The sandwich is good, but feels more like a “house signature” deli sandwich, than a supremely refined cheesesteak.

All those differences aside, BB’s cheesesteaks are tasty little sandwiches. For $5 you get a sandwich that won’t debilitate you, a variety of flavors and a few minutes to consider their aggro slogan. No, it’s not the “Best damn cheesesteak”, hell, it’s not even really a cheesesteak! Sorry, BB, you’re out of the running. Nice sandwich though.

The roasted onions and ’secret sauce’ make it a higher strategy than most, but the boring ingredients make it lower than average execution:

Their convenient dissection:

Served on a little plastic plate:

The angle makes it look bigger than it is:

Look how big the roll is!

First up is the Handwich, a turkey and cheese sandwich cut to look like a hand. Brilliant, what would kids love more than eating gigantic hands? Don’t bite the hand that feeds you or how about a knuckle sandwich, ha ha ha! The package comes with the small handwich, a fruit roll up, Annie’s organic cheese crackers and a bottle of KidFresh branded water. So how was the sandwich? Bland, dry and uneventful. Maybe kids don’t care about sandwiches, or maybe they don’t have the taste buds for flavor, but I think these sandwiches are about as bland as you can get. They taste like what you’d get if you just put bread and turkey and cheese together: dry, bland and dry. Thank god they come with water! Maybe this is a secret plot to get kids to drink water at a young age (and locking them into the bottled water industry).

The second lunchbox is more of the same but in a different shape. It’s a chicken sandwich cut into an adorable teddybear. The package comes with the bearwich, yogurt in a tube (which is really bizarre), cheese crackers and water. Like the handwich, the bearwich is really dry. The chicken is only slightly more moist than the cheese and like before, you’ll be glad you’ve got your water.

Overall, the KidFresh lunchboxes are great for little kids, but not if you want them to grow up as sandwich enthusiasts. Couldn’t they have added a little lettuce, or a tomato or maybe some condiments? For $5 a box, I think they could manage. Buy them for your kids, but don’t bother eating them yourself, I had to eat both boxes to get full.

WichPlot:

Here’s the handwich:

The handwich unpacked:

I wonder who gets to eat the outside of the mold?

Too dry!

The Teddy Chicken

Bearwich:

Look how flattened the bearwich was:

Better luck next time bearwich:

The menu has all the deli basics: egg sandwiches, omelets, cold meat and vegetable platters, burgers, fries, soup and dessert. The setup is familiar but the specifics are sometimes different. For example, for $8.50 you can get a cold plate of “chopped Vegetables with cottage cheese and sour cream.” (yuck!) Most of the menu is sandwiches and breakfast foods, and there ain’t nothin’ wrong with that!

I sampled three sandwiches: the tuna salad ($7.25), the pastrami on rye ($8.50) and the BLT ($6.00). All were absolutely fantastic. Each sandwich is a bit basic: just simple ingredients served on regular uneventful bread. Each sandwich was simple and heavenly.

The tuna salad was the best I’ve ever had. I don’t usually order it because it tends to be too mushy, too lemony, full of chopped vegetables or just kind of soggy and gross. This one was none of the above. It was balanced and flavorful, simply prepared on rye bread with a tomato slice and some iceberg lettuce. It did suffer from a bit of flavor creep, but given how tasty the fillings were, I was glad to have a little extra at the end.

The pastrami was on par with the best in the city (2nd ave Deli and Katz). It’s that good. It’s warm and buttery, served on plain rye bread (best complimented by a healthy dose of mustard.) With flavor just short of Katz’s and almost half the price, bring your pastrami loving tourist friends here.

To finish the hat trick, the BLT was amazing. Again they used simple ingredients: toasted white bread with a slather of mayo, iceberg lettuce, bacon and tomatoes. It works beautifully. It was crunchy and flavorful. The veggies do a perfect balancing act with the intensity of the mayo and bacon.

Who knew amazing sandwiches could be this simply prepared? Eisenbergs is a welcome relief from the legions of foofoo chefs who think that good sandwiches require portobellas sauted in aged balsamic, on imported focaccia. Ugh. Time to get back to basic’s people! These are the sandwiches your mom couldn’t make this good. Dig in.

Eisenberg scored high marks across execution, with low-to mid strategy sandwiches.

Triumphant Tuna Salad:

Powerful Pastrami:

BBBLTTT (Best Basic BLT Totally Triumphs):

Coverage: BBC and Canada.com

The sandwiches from Porchetta are delicious, if a bit expensive ($9.75 with tax). They place a large portion of slow roasted pork (juicy topped with cracklins) in a sliced ciabatta rol. That’s it. No sauce, no olive oil, no lettuce. Yes! The simplest of sandwich complexity: a single ingredient. (Aside: This isn’t terribly different from a pulled pork sandwich. Is pork the only meat that can be happily enjoyably with only bread?)

The sandwich was a pleasure to eat. There was no filling creep, no trouble fighting to keep the sandwich in tact and no struggle to bite through the bread. The pork was juicy with slight variations in texture and flavor as you bite into more and less fatty peices (naturally, the more the better). The cracklins were tasty and did provide an alternative texture, though some were MUCH too hard and crunchy and if I didn’t expect them would have screamed and thrown them on the floor. Ask for the non-crunchy skin parts and extra fatty pork bits. The bread did a good job holdling in all the fat, grease and juice without ever becoming soggy. The crust was slightly too tough and occasionally felt too chewy. I recommend that they find slightly softer-crusted bread and carve out a bit of the insides to focus the flavor on the pork.

Since they are loaded with pork, they are a bit heavy in your stomach, but since they’re not too big you don’t risk feeling ill from too much pork fat. After one sandwich I was a bit hungry, but would not recommend ordering two. Get some sides or an empanada at Rubens around the corner (122 1st Ave).

This sandwich is delicious. Go eat one.

Starting with this review, all sandwich reviews will be plotted on the ‘wich plot (for background see the ‘wich plot primer). It should be no surprise that this one falls under very high execution (amazing pork and decent bread) and low strategy (only one ingredient). I’ve appended the plot with the price, so you can decide for yourself if $9.75 is worth it.

Cracklin’s and fatty pork:

Simply beautiful:

Take a closer look, no biting please:

The sandwiches by definition aren’t that bad, but the construction is awful. The tapenade soaks through, the chicken is mushified by veggies, and the side salads are soggy (who wants side salad? If I wanted a salad I would have ordered one!). The only upside was that the bread was perfectly toasted and crunchy. Instead of the 12 sandwich offerings on the menu, I would have been much happier with 3 or 4 sandwiches that are done properly: no soggy tapenade, no boring side salad and no mushy fillings that seem like they were scooped from a huge vat made the night before.

Spicy Chicken with mixed greens, cucumber and tomato ($7.95): Cut in a heart. How cute. Too bad they don’t love sandwiches enough to make them delicious AND hearty

It tasted as mushy and pre-chewed as it looks!

Ham and Swiss Croissant ($3.95) The best sandwich of test!

It got a bit flattened during toasting, but it’s was better than being cold:

Vegan Angelique: avocado, mixed greens, tomato, sprouts and olive tapenade on 7 grain bread ($7.95). Look how the olive tapenade soaks through the bread. Gross!

Too much lettuce is pushing all the wet ingredients into the soggy bread!

This is the first version of an attempt to better understand sandwiches. All good analysis is easily summarized into a 2×2 plot that somehow includes everything. For sandwiches this manifests as the “‘Wich Plot©” and shows all sandwiches in the context of “Strategy” and “Execution”.

The plot:

Execution is a scale of how well the sandwich is made, in reality. This is the simpler axis as it’s directly observable by eating the sandwich! Some factors that influence the execution axis:

• How well is the sandwich made? Does it fall apart when you eat it?
• What is the quality of the ingredients? (Is the bread hard and nasty? Are the meats unnatural square shapes?)
• How appetizing does the sandwich look?
• How much love went into building the sandwich?

Strategy is a rating of the sandwich recipe complexity. It’s the rating of the sandwich in theory. Kind of like how each performance in the Olympics gets a difficulty rating. Some factors that influence sandwich strategy ranking include:

• Are there lots of ingredients?
• Does each ingredient require special preparation (roasting, skinning, cooking, etc.)?
• Does the sandwich require a very delicate or specific construction process to be properly made (like a croque monsieur)?

Here’s some samples of how common sandwiches fall on the strategy axis:

By combining the two axis we can start to get a feel for what it means when a sandwich falls in each of the four quadrants. In counter-clockwise from the bottom left:

• Poor execution of low strategy sandwiches: You must be hungry; you are making the simplest of sandwiches without regard to quality or love for sandwiches. Skip these sandwiches, and go have some pasta. Seriously, don’t bother.
• Good execution of low strategy sandwiches: Now we’re talking! You’re practicing the basic sandwiches because you love them. The sandwiches are simple, but delicious and don’t deserve any harassment for their imbalance.
• Good execution of high strategy sandwiches: Now we’re REALLY talking! These are the special sandwiches that allow the whole category to rival the rest of the food world. In extremes, these are the tiny open faced sandwiches that you can find at some of the best restaurants in the world.
• Poor execution of high strategy sandwiches: This is just silly. Why bother making a complicated sandwich if you aren’t going to put any love into it? Some kind of a sick ingredient fetish? More processed meats and cheeses do not a better sandwich make!

Recap:

Let’s plot some sandwiches! I put 5 on the chart, though you can ask yourself “Where would the last sandwich I had fall?” The actual plotting is rather fuzzy since this is not math and there are no numbers.

To really get value out of this analysis, we have to draw some conclusions about certain groups of sandwiches and get some information that might help us in reality. I tried to aggregate some common groups of sandwiches and highlighted them on the chart below with colored circles. You can see that the chain sandwich shops generally, use poor quality ingredients (I hate that shredded lettuce!) and that if you have a few fancy ingredients leftover from dinner, you can whip up a tasty sandwich (though they are usually fairly simple). Specialty sandwich shops are where the love is: decent construction with decent strategy! Now when someone asks why you don’t like Subway or Quizno’s you can say “Oh, yuck, you eat low execution sandwiches?” That is love.

A lot of the article is basic information, but he makes two good assertions. First, his definition of sandwiches, (which I disagree with):

“My definition is somewhat broader [than two slices of bread enclosing a filling]: A sandwich is a filling enclosed in bread or pastry that can be eaten by hand.”

Secondly, his respect for bread. Everyone describes what’s IN the sandwich while forgetting the bread. Thanks for the reminder on the importance of bread, Kevin!

“Wherever a sandwich is from, though, its foundation, its most important single element, is the bread. Great bread can elevate great ingredients to new heights. Bad bread can make even the finest fillings ho-hum.”

He also includes recipes for some under-the-radar sandwiches: Muffaletta, Cubano, Bahn Mi and Shwarma (in a pita).

While seemingly nondescript, the sandwich is well constructed. The soft, hot roast beef never exhibited any signs of filling creep, the mozzarella was melted through and the bun kept it all in a neat package while helping the texture and not masking any flavors. That is what this sandwich is all about: texture first flavor second. Sure it tasted good, but the thoroughly soft and warm texture was more inviting. Never was it mushy, or crumbly. Each ingredient provided a slight resistance and came together to soothe like a warm blanket. The portion was large, but not holy-crap-I-can’t-believe-I-finished-it-,-I-can’t-stand-to-walk-and-will-just-take-a-nap-here food-come large. It was the right size.

While I wouldn’t make a weekend event of it, I’d head back there without hesitation. The prices are a little high and the food certainly isn’t gourmet, but Champ’s Gourmet Deli is worth a stop if you’re in the neighborhood (or really like to help tourists with directions). The entrance is really on the south-east corner of Trinity and Rector Streets.

Manhattan Special: Roast Beef, Mozzarella cheese on garlic bread (or in this case a sesame seed roll), $6.75

The sign on Trinity St:

Christmas Surprise:

See all that delicious:

Mmm:

I worry that as you ate the sandwich, the crust would push the fillings out torwards the long edge. Or maybe it works if you eat from the long edge in at the risk of pushing the fillings out the edges. After all, isn’t this why the crust is on the outside? This sounds like a challenge for the SANDWICHLab! Also see SANDWICHLab Submissions and Lab Results.

(Image care of Gutenberg @ Daily Feed)