Now, my USPS guy, he’s my new hookup. He told me about Allie’s and that place is a very close second behind C McGee’s. Very close. He asks me today where I’m going for lunch and I tell him I hadn’t thought about it yet. I hadn’t. I was still coming to terms with the fact that I can no longer eat Marconi brand giardiniera. (Don’t ask, just listen: Every time I eat Marconi brand giardiniera, I get some form of gastro-intestinal distress. On the Soft Kathryn Stress-Romance scale, the idea of a life where I have to eat any brand of giardiniera that isn’t Marconi rates a solid stressful.) So I hadn’t packed a lunch and I hadn’t really thought ahead.
USPS guy (I swear, I’ve been here a year and a half and I still don’t know the guy’s name. That rates somewhere between stressful and romantic.) asks if I’ve ever been to this Trieste Café and I say no and he swears they have the best gyros in town. He’s not steered me wrong in the past so I say that’s what I’m doing for lunch.
I go there, meaning I look around the ground floor of the Lumber Exchange Building like a doofus until a tired man behind a desk sleepily pointed me to it before succumbing to Hypnos. I walk in the place and, OK, the fucking place is tiny, we’re talking about the size of the original Lu’s. I get up to the counter and an old Greek dude asks if he can help me and I tell him I’ll take a gyro to go and this is how Greek this guy is: He asks if I want the the sambooch.
What?
Sambooch?
I’m, uh, I’m sorry, I don’t -
He makes a shape with his hands and says, “Sambooch?”
Oh, yeah, yeah, just the sandwich, yeah.
This other big Greek dude is already working on it and let me tell you something: About two years ago I think, there was a big deal about mise en place all over NPR. Not just on The Splendid Table, either. About every few weeks, they’d pull some cocky little NYC line cook from this month’s Williamsburg pop-up experience to talk about some shit and you’d have to hear about how mise en place is a guiding principle for everything in life and how this little stuffed shirt was superior to you because he used mise en place. It was enough to make me mistakenly hate cooking for a minute until I realized, no, I actually hate New York.
Anyway, mise en place is basically how you set up your cooking station. I’m sure somebody will want to correct me. I’m not interested. Back to the point: This big Greek dude’s mise en place looked like he had been murdering squids all day. I mean it was fucked up. It was covered in a sheen of tomato guts and there were two squeezed lemon halves off to the far corner of his cutting board. He lifts a lid off a metal tub and scoops out some lamb meat and then I can’t see on the other side of him.
He hands this thing the size of a fucking haggis to the first Greek dude and the first Greek dude tells me to take a bag of chips on my way out. I picked dill pickle chips. I was in there maybe three minutes.
So, how was my sambooch?
Fucker was big, pita was chewy, lettuce was green, tomato was juicy, onion was crisp, lamb meat was tender and flavorful but the star? The real porno star of this sambooch? Got to give it up for the tzatziki, and not just because I love tzatziki. If I wasn’t sure I would die from it, I would eat nothing bu tzatziki. Yes, I know it’s a condiment.
Let me tell you about this tzatziki. I’ve had Christo’s, I’ve had Holy Land’s, I’ve had Zakia’s, I’ve had Greek Grill’s (meaning I’ve had Sysco’s), brother, I’ve had tzatziki. Good tzatziki, too, and I would love to talk to you about this tzatziki.
I thought there was fucking cucumber on my gyro - nothing I would be opposed to, mind you - but, no, it was the tzatziki. Vibrant lemon notes supported a robust, pronounced dill - I mean, I’m talking about dill - that made my life worth living all of a sudden. I’ve experienced only a few moments like this. It’s the moment when Marquee Moon “clicks” for you, it’s the moment you bed your twenty-year crush, it’s the moment you have this fucking tzatziki. Jesus Christ, this fucking tzatziki. I can die now because I’ve had this tzatziki.
It was eight and some change before tip. So eleven some odd dollars to have my fucking life changed. There was no wait, no line, and this fuckin’ tzatziki - goddamn, this fuckin’ tzatziki, I’m telling you. I had no idea tzatziki could be this good. It was, and I believe I’m using this word as correctly as one can, revelatory. I’m going back there, I’m giving them more of my money, I might actually put in an application.
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