From scratch means: You grow your tomato, you grow your lettuce, you cure your own bacon or pancetta, you bake your own bread (wild yeast preferred and gets higher marks but is not required), you make your own mayo. All other embellishments, creative interpretations of the BLT welcome.

He judged the sandwiches based on best photo, best reinterpretation and best overall preparation. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to submit a recipe. Fortunately I have plenty of time to drool over the photos of mouth-watering BLTs.

In his commentary, Ruhlman hits the nail on the head. Most BLTs are too wimpy, the bacon is so slight that it feels more like a veggie sandwich topped with a little sprinkling of tasty pork. Instead he slightly refines the BLT as “[...] a pork belly sandwich, garnished with L, T and mayo.” Yes! It’s a bacon steak sandwich with some incidental accessories. I can’t wait for this bit of wisdom to percolate through the food industry and BLT’s arrive on plates heavy with pork-belly.

Did anyone here enter the contest? Have any other insights on the BLT?

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 portobellos 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):