Simply Sandwiches

Shorty’s aka “Tony Lukes” (576 9th Ave, NYC; between 41st and 42nd st) is another place I want to love. Cheap beer, decent selection and cheesesteaks. Cheesesteaks. Just the word makes me relax. I can almost feel the wiz and beef fat coating the inside of my mouth (okay, okay, “wiz in the mouth” sounds awful, but you know what I’m talking about!). If I focus on it enough, I’m almost full and almost dozing off. Yes, cheesesteak. Take a minute to try yourself, I’ll wait.

Where were we? Oh right, at Shorty’s! I tried their “Shorty’s Classic” ($10 for a whole, $7 for a Shorty): grilled tomatoes, Italian seasoning, oregano, provolone and steak. The bread was fresh and fantastic: a little mushy and a little crusty to keep all that grease contained. The sandwich was cheesy and very salty from the Italian seasoning. Unfortunately among all that seasoning the actual steak wasn’t too flavorful and the provolone was hard to taste. I had fun eating it and would return if I had a craving near by, but it’s not worth much of a journey. Maybe their regular steak has more of that greasy punch that just takes me away? I’m going to test drive the regular wiz wit’ later this week and see how it measures up to the big boys.

Update, 9.27.09: I went back and had the sandwich I should’ve gotten the first time: the regular cheesesteak with wiz and mushrooms ($10). It was a whole different experience. Where the “Shorty’s Classic” was too salty and not cheesy enough, the regular cheese steak was fantastic: gooey, steaky, cheesy with just a hint of onions and mushrooms. It was nearly perfect. This is what I was expecting an uptown competitor to Wogies! It’s a little sad to see a place that serves such a good steak sandwich dumb it down by going ‘upmarket’ and taking all the flavor out. When you come to Shorty’s, do me a favor, don’t read the menu. Stick with what you know: wiz ‘wit is all you need to try.

In this case, the lower strategy is better, KISS I suppose:

The classic freshly unwrapped:

Melty classic:

I’ve never been interested in space flight. I’ve seen enough sci-fi movies to know that humans humans will always get slaughtered by aliens, exploded into nothing ordriven mad by mysterious space-bound evil from another dimension. It’s hard for me to admit, but I’d be willing to brave those horrors for a vacation trip to a sandwich planet — just not this Sandwich Planet (522 9th Ave, at 39th st.). Please not this sandwich planet. (Not to be confused with the amazing Chicken Planet)

This sandwich planet isn’t quite what I’d been dreaming of. Instead it seems more like a sandwich factory or a sandwich emporium. Now, I’ve never even been to this sandwich planet, but I have a pretty good idea how it works. When you order online, you pick what you want in your ‘wich from a dizzying list of meats, veggies, breads and sauces. The order shoots out of a printer and the line-cooks assemble from the dizzying buckets of prepped ingredients. It gets wrapped and biked over to your office, where you chow down. Sandwich efficiency, I say!

The sandwiches were okay. I’m always perplexed and confused by these DIY-schemes: if they’re running a sandwich planet, don’t they know what ingredients go well together? Customers ain’t chefs. I tried to make a spin on the classic russian roast beef: roast beef on rye with mustard, lettuce, russian dressing, slaw and jalapeno slices. I ordered it with onions, but they must’ve be blasted into space by a vengeful AI. All these ingredients for $8.75, which seems like a deal.

Clearly, I ordered too many items; I got greedy. When each item is just a line on the screen it’s so easy to order too much. Veggies were decent, the roast beef was way too stringy. After each bite I had to pull it out of my mouth with my hands because I couldn’t bite through. Yuck. I’m glad there were no mirrors or I might’ve stopped eating. The sandwich wasn’t bad, just boring and unexceptional. I’m not sure if that’s my fault or theirs, but I’m not itching to return.

Plotted based on my sandwich, though strategy and cost can vary as you make a more and more complicated sandwich:

Neatly packaged:

Unpackaged:

Food-porn: