So, went to this new-to-me joint for lunch because ramen again just sounded depressing.
I may never understand the Twin Cities’ preoccupation with smothering every edible thing in sight in lettuce, tomato, and mayo or even regarding its inclusion as a matter worthy of entirely renaming a sandwich. But then I do hail from a state where a fresh human heart was recently found just chilling in a park like “What’s up? Gotta smoke?”
In the Twin Cities, particularly in the culinary sinkhole that is downtown MPLS (pronounced Mipples), there seem to be two distinct mindsets of the restauranteur: The first one belonging to the kind of puffed-ego ponce that attempts to jazz up deviled ham with thinly sliced coral reef and unrefined petroleum with a dash of Corinthian Cherry Pepper extract on a multi-grain Canadian naan coated with a triple IPA aioli with an insulin shot garnish. Everything is made from scratch in-house daily, and what isn’t is “locally sourced”, and the whole package is labeled “artisanal” so they can charge you seventeen eighteen bucks and the shit just tastes like the time you stuffed your mouth full of rubberbands when you were seven.
The second school of thought is usually found at a mom and pop type joint, kept up to the too shiny standards of downtown to be called a greasy spoon, where the most special thing that happens to your sandwich is the addition of cheese for twenty five cents. You get lettuce, tomato, and mayo whether you asked for it or not and that’s generally OK. That’s the place I usually spend my five dollars at and am happy to tip two bucks on the bill.
So, yes, I’ve had my Be'Wiched, I’ve had my Vellee, I’ve had my Frank from Philly, and I’ve very recently had Band Box Diner, where I enjoyed definitely the best burger I’ve had in all of my now-closing-in-on-eleven years in the Twin Cities. You can guess which place will get my return business sooner.
And it’s like that at today’s luncheon spot, a sandwich joint in the skyway across the street called Dagwood’s that has posters from all the Blondie movies on the wall. They’ve got hot and cold sandwiches and soups, salads, little breakfast buddies, that kind of thing, and they’re cheap.
I look over the menu and they’ve got this hookup called the Dagwood Special - pastrami, ham, salami with (you guessed it) lettuce, tomato, and mayo, but also onion and melted cheese. (Seeing as how I couldn’t taste the cheese, I’m going to assume it’s provolone.) It’s a hoagie, it comes with chips or a side salad, and it’s seven beans.
So lunch time rolls around and I trot my sexy black Irish ass across the street and up to the skyway and hit Dagwood’s. A bunch of people who looked like Body Snatchers new to Earth and our concept of forming a queue milled about, listening for their order number to be called out and at one point, the Asian woman behind the counter explains to this doughy-faced elderly guy what all was happening with his sandwich - this kind of meat; lettuce, tomato, mayo (or as I’m about to start calling it: Caucasian sandwich slaw); melted cheese; house made dressing and house-baked bread. She tells him about the dressing when he’s all, “’s'up with dat?” but the way old white dudes do it when speaking to a person of color who handles their food: “And what, exactly, is the house dressing? What goes in that?” and she tells him and it sounds like Italian dressing to me. At ease now that it seems that this Jewel of the Orient isn’t planning on assassinating him with poisoned salad dressing for his state secrets, he asks, “Yo, girl, whaddup wit dat bread?” but again like an old white dude, this time like the old white dude who’s impressed that a foreigner can speak English so good: “And can you tell me about the bread?” She smiles and tells him they bake it every day.
I place my order, I’m getting the Dagwood Special, I wait for them to ask me if I want the salad or the chips because I want the salad but they never ask, so I’m told I’m order seventy nine and then take my place back with the rest of the Body Snatchers and listen to their numbers get called starting with seventy five. Sweet! My order should be up in no time!
Nope. Eighty, the aforementioned old white dude, who may actually BE eighty gets called before me, probably because his sandwich was simpler than my three meat job: He got tuna. Probably something his doctor told him to do. He probably sits down at his desk and looks down at his sandwich past his old man tits and wishes for the days when he could eat a steak while it was still attached to the cow and get six chicks pregnant at the same time, the way they used to do it in World War I: The Prussian Menace.
I shouldn’t joke because that will be me one day; I already have hair growing out of my old old man ears but fuck it: I died inside a long time ago and I’m just waiting for my body to catch up. ANYWAY, this sad old bald widowed fuck has to eat tuna on plain bread, no Caucasian sandwich slaw for him. Poor old bastard’s ticker can’t even handle cheese. The house made dressing would probably shut down his old kidneys; OF COURSE his sandwich comes up before mine did, one: It was just tuna on bread and two: He doesn’t have that much time left!
THEN I got my sandwich. It came with chips. Probably Old Dutch. People love their Old Dutch up here. The ruffled variety, to boot. Not really pissed off about it, just would’ve preferred the salad.
How was the sandwich? (Because you know what potato chips taste like.) (Or at least I hope you do.) (I mean, who are you? Gary Johnson? Are potato chips your Aleppo?)
Well, the sandwich was a forearm-sized (aka the best sized) hoagie. The bread was soft, not chewy, with no crunch to the crust. It was just soft. Pillowy, you could say. And it tasted OK. Not phenomenal but you could definitely tell it was baked that day. The signature dressing? It was tangy, it tasted like Italian dressing to me but mellower, not as assertive. Again, you could tell it wasn’t store bought.
But here is where I arrived at the crossroads of artisanal “sandwich works” with its locally sourced clobber-mouthed sturgeon steaks and hand-pressed cocoa sheets and the mom & pop lunch counter that asks, “You want Swiss or American on that?”
The Caucasian sandwich slaw was… Really good? Like, totally noticeable and really good? The hell you say. Or I say, I guess. But, yes, the tomatoes were freshly cut and full of snap, or as much as a tomato can snap. They were firm, juicy, and tasted like an essential ingredient rather than a placeholder to justify a fifty cent upcharge. The mayo was tangy and creamy, and - holy shit could some midwesterners take a cue from this place - NOT applied with a concrete trowel. It was there, you could taste it, and you didn’t need more of it. The lettuce? Not cut so fresh but it’s iceberg so it doesn’t matter. Who uses romain, anyway?
The sandwich slaw almost made up for the fact that I could see the cheese but not taste it and that if there was pastrami on the sandwich, there was no way of being certain, even as I fucking started at it. But I could tell there was ham and salami.
It’s above average, it’s worth every penny you spend on it (my total was $7.74 after tax), it’s local, it’s filling without being too filling… Would I go back there? Probably. Am I in a hurry? Not entirely.
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