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:

I tasted both the Black Forest and the Smart Duck. The bread on both was fantastic, crusty on the outside and soft on the inside. First up, the black forest: smoked prosciutto, brie and roasted peppers with mayo, mustard, lettuce, $10 for a whole. It was amazing. Buttery, smoky and rich. The brie overloaded the flavors a little too much, but it was still delicious.

The Smart Duck (smoked duck breast, brie and cornichons, $10 again) wasn’t as successful. While the bread was just as perfect and the brie was fantastic, the smoked duck breast was served cold. Cold duck breast isn’t very flavorful and just tasted like cold chewy meat. It seemed like good duck, just served way too cold. I think this sandwich would be ama-azing if served with hot duck. It would be double buttery (brie and duck) with salty crunchy cornichons.

Quack quack:

Quack quack:

Quack quack:

Warning: prosciutto inside:

Black forest sitting pretty:

Can you see inside the black forest?

Show up before or after the lunch crush or you’ll have to wait in line. Not that it’s always a bad thing, since you’ll need a minute to read their menu, oggle the array of italian food in the glass cases and watch the break being made in the bakery to the left. After you notice the bakery, you’ll see the text “Your choice of soft or crusty bread” and you know you’re about to get something special. These guys know sandwiches.

We tried three sandwiches, all with the crusty bread:

• Dom’s Special: Classic Italian (pistachio mortadella, provolone, natural casing genoa salami) with the addition of sweet capicola and prosciutto. Served with chopped lettuce, tomato and balsamic vinegar. ($7.99)
• Manzo: house-made garlic roast beef, caramelized onion, Gorgonzola and arugula. ($8.99)
• Lamb Panini: feta, lamb, oregano, lite mayo, diced tomato. ($8.50)

The lamb panini was a daily special and may not be available all the time, it’s okay though, the other two blew it out of the water. The trend for delis serving Italian sandwiches is to stuff them so full of mediocre meats, pre-cut tasteless cheeses and so much chopped lettuce you think you’re eating a salad. Thankfully Domenic knows better. this Italian is pared down to just the right serving size of high-quality essentials cased in soft-and-crusty Italian bread. That means there’s just enough chopped lettuce and tomato to add texture, it never becomes the only texture. This sandwich is a work of art and puts all other Italian sandwiches (and breads) to shame. Compare the photo’s below with your last Italian sandwich. It looks smaller doesn’t it? It looks simpler, more refined, more focused, more delicious!

The Manzo was equally impressive: the roast beef was tender, delicious and perfectly complimented by the onions, cheese and arugula. Like the roast beef from Defonte‘s, it was a perfectly-done shade of light pink, not grey, and still incredibly moist! Take a look at the pictures below, you can see it shine and glimmer with tasty morsels in the sunshine. Yum. Just like the Dom’s special, there was just enough arugula to provide texture and not to overwhelm the other flavors. And again, that bread is to die for!

The lamb panini was less spectacular. The lamb was a bit too dry and the feta’s texture made it hard to take a few bites without a beverage nearby. It left us wondering “Maybe the lamb was leftover from the day before?” Unless the specials are really fresh, I’d skip them and stick to the proven sandwich menu.

Domenics is one of the few places to be solidly placed in high-strategy and high-execution sandwiches. For under $10 you can taste the food of the gods:

The anticipation is killing me:

Ahh, there it is:

Can you taste it?

Mmmmmmanzo!

Mmmmmm

Lamb Panini:

Pass the aranciata:

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):

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 submit to you, precious readers, the first piece of the boring-sandwich conspiracy: a guide [461k pdf] on how to pair sandwiches with deli meats from the US Dairy Export Council (USDEC). Sounds ominous to me! Naturally,they have an agenda to promote sandwiches as a vehicle for cheese consumption. Oddly enough they focused only on meat and cheese combinations and don’t include the most obvious cheesy sandwich of all: Grilled cheese (Tested in the SANDWICHLab here).

What’s your vote: are deli owners just uncreative or are they being manipulated by the multi-million dollar cheese lobby?