Being on vacation, I decided to do things I don’t normally do. So I’ve been going to wildflower gardens and bird sanctuaries and cemeteries and making it a point to eat lunch at places I’ve never eaten before. To pull it off today, I Googled “deli near me” and got handed my usual list of places that I’ve been to already and then I see Lowry Hill Meats and I look at their menu and I think, “This looks like, uh… Huh.”
And that, my friends, is how you can tell I’m excited.
I bike over there and, yep, nothing here has changed. Everybody in possession of an internal combustion engine attached to four wheels is out here playing like they’re Rutger Hauer in Hitcher and I can only wait for the walk light to allow me to bike into oncoming traffic because the laws of right-of-way don’t exist here in Lowry Hill East, fuck you, you pussy-ass “bicyclist”, why don’t you get a car and a job, you commie scum fuck, this is America where I’m the most important person in the world and you’re making me late by crossing in front of me just because “a sign” told you and your gay dreadlocks you could. I AM AN AMERICAN FOOTBALL LOVING CARNIVORE AND ME AND MY CAR ARE IMPORTANT SO IMPORTANT SO GODDAMNED IMPORTANT AND YOU DARE NOT RESPECT ME!? I SUPPORT TROOPS, MOTHERFUCKER!!!
What?
Oh, sorry. I just, uh, saw a guy look at me funny while I was crossing the street and I can only imagine that’s what was going on in his head.
Anyway, I bike over to the Lowry Hill Meats and it’s pretty much in the old Rye space - actually looked it up. Rye’s old address is 1930 and Lowry Hill Meats is 1934. Whatever. I go inside and I take a look at the menu board and this dude at the meat slicer asks if I’m looking for some lunch and I says yeah, I says and he says there’s a sandwich menu right ovah heah and he points like to this chawkboad, see? And I walks over theah, I does, and I reads the menu and this gothic hipstah chick, she stahts rattlin off the specials fuh the day at me-
No, you know what? I can’t keep doing the nineteen thirties New England accent.
Anyway, I tell her I’ll just have the roast beef.
Oh, and this ginger ale.
And it comes out to ten something, OK, that’s cool. No biggie.
So what’s on the roast beef?
Look out, because this aint Arby’s.
They take roast beef and put it on filone with beet horseradish, shaved red onion, butter, oil & vinegar.
So, how did it taste?
Like fucking vinegar.
You know how roast beef when cooked to rare, still bloody as the red tent - I was going to go with the crude menstruation joke, instead, I went with the literary one, you’re welcome - has a metallic taste to it? How it’s savory and has that low buttery saxophone drone on the bottom but it just has that high-pitched iron taste that’s complimented so well by marjoram and oregano? You know? Well, I was expecting that. That’s what I want when I go to a butcher shop / deli with “meats” in their name. I’ve made the conscious decision to eat red meat - tell my doctor - I should taste red meat.
Instead I tasted a lot of this beet horseradish, or, rather, the vinegar in it, that was complimented by more vinegar. I think it was a Nero Wolfe movie where Nero chides his assistant (not Archie Goodwin) over fucking up his salad, “How many times must I tell you? Be a spendthrift with the oil, a miser with the vinegar!” Or something like that. Might not even have been Nero Wolfe. It might have been a different fat-detective-who-solves-crimes-from-his-La-Z-Boy-while-his-right-hand-man-goes-out-and-does-all-the-work movie.
Anyway, that was all I could taste, vinegar. I can’t tell you shit about the onions, nothing about the butter or what it was doing there when there was oil, the bread was chewy and resistant without being a bastard, that was nice, the meat was chewy, wished I could have tasted that, you got me drawing a blank on the horseradish, the beets gave up a little sweetness so I guess I had sweet & sour beef for lunch, and the goddamned ginger ale was some organic fuck you job from some place in Wisconsin that burned my throat going down.
I don’t want to disparage the place, clearly they put thought and consideration into what they do. They could just slap some roast beef on rye and hand you a couple mustard packets (Brother’s, Cecil’s), but they want their sandwich to be worth your time, worth your visit. So, without trying to be too chefy about it, they probably sat down and thought long and hard over their sandwich menu. When it came to roast beef, what works with roast beef? Onions and um… Why, horseradish, of course! But does horseradish cut it? Does horseradish stand out? Does horseradish say “us”? Not really. What if we make it - Well, what if we make it - There’s this stuff they serve at Passover, beet horseradish. What if we try that?
Probably a conversation like that.
With the exception of oil & vinegar, nothing about this sandwich sounds like it doesn’t belong on or with roast beef. But they need to back away from the vinegar because there’s plenty of that in the beet horseradish, and while they’re at it, nix the oil, too. There’s already butter there for the fat.
So, it’s one sandwich, one visit, I can tell they care about what they produce, I can tell that they’ve carefully considered their sandwich construction, they’re erring on the conservative side which is nice because I don’t want to walk in some place and find steamed salmon with a pear marinara on pumpernickel pita or some wonky horseshit like that on the menu. I’m tempted to give this one a pass and see what else they can do. They’ve got pork shoulder, they’ve got turkey, they’ve got this sandwich called the French Exit which sounds like either a Third Reich joke or a poo joke, I might try that. But after today’s sandwich, I can’t tell you to give them your money.
Because I’m telling you to give me your money! (Oh, shut up, you saw this coming.) That’s right! I made a book. It’s called Batpussy: A Speculative Fiction and it’s all about how the movie Batpussy (which is a thing that exists, you can look it up) was made except it’s all just straight up lies because nobody knows how it was made and nobody has ever come forward to take responsibility for it.
For ten dollars, you get cocaine, you get fried chicken, you get murder, you get an old racist Greek guy whose name is Irving Spanakopita, you get oil changes, and you get some sex but mostly you get just straight up fucking lies!
Get it here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/batpussy-charlie-pauken/1129374780?ean=9781538094839
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