Beancounter, 5 March 2019

   So, today is Pączki Day, which I can't spell correctly because A with an ogonek (that curly cue thing on the bottom of letters) doesn't work in Blogger when I use alt+0261 so - Oh, let me try copy and paste and... Huh. That looks... Whatever.
   Now, paczki, which is how we're spelling it because I'm not going through that headache repeatedly, they sell out quick and Kramarczuk's is the only place even near me that will have real paczki and that's a bit of a ride from the office. So I settle for a jelly donut, fucking sacreligious, and I get a break in my day and I go to Cafe Donut in the Skyway and I see their fritters and bear claws and long johns and cruellers and I ask the lady behind the counter, "Y'all got a jelly donut?"
   She smiles at me and says, "No. Today?"
   "Oh, man."
   "Yeah, I know, I even made extra for today and people just..." She shook her head.

   I thanked her and began my walk back to the office and I get to figuring that I want a snack and I come up to Beancounter, a "hipster coffee shop" and I see the sandwich board outside. They got sammies, one is bacon cheddar and the other is avocado provolone. OK.
   I ask the kid behind the counter, who looks like Anton Yelchin, which he recommends and he tells me the bacon cheddar is more popular but, if he had to guess, they sell about fifty-fifty, which isn't what I asked and then I think to myself, "I should not have bacon and avocado is a super food or something and if the bacon one is popular, let's do something different. The Eagles were popular, too. I want to listen to Cabaret Voltaire."
   Actually, I don't want to listen to Cabaret Voltaire; the one time I heard them I couldn't get into them and then I tried getting into them like fifteen years later and I still wasn't feeling them.
   Anyway, instead of my much beloved paczek (singular paczki), I got an avocado provolone egg sandwich.
   I can already sense some of you about to make a crack about me eating avocado toast and joke's on you, I've never had avocado toast.

   LET ME START BY SAYING THAT IT TAKES SOME FUCKING GUTS TO OPEN AN INDEPENDENT CAFE IN THE SKYWAY, let me get that out of the way because this is not about to be a flattering review. I'm also not going to hurt 'em real bad like. Just going to be honest. So if Beancounter has this primo real estate in the skyway, in a corner, with windows near an entrance / exit and they're still open, they're doing something right.
   However, this sandwich left room for improvement.
   Let's acknowledge the provolone...
   OK, got the Sysco joke out of the way, now we can keep trucking.
   The avocado? You know how avocado tastes. And this wasn't an avocado spread they skimped on, no, this was slices of avocado arranged like terracotta tile. This was good. I paid for avocado and I feel like I got my three dollars worth of avocado, so we're good there.
   The egg? Could have used some salt and pepper. I like my egg yolk runny so I would have preferred if it were cooked over medium instead of over hard, which was always how Doom pestered me into making my eggs, blah blah blah. But the egg was freshly fried up instead of reconstituted. That's a big plus. That they make things fresh to order honestly a feature of this place that I imagine is earning them their coveted spot in the Skyway.
   The bread was, well, it was a big square thing that, once you bit into it, had the texture of an English muffin inside but a nice substantial but forgiving crust on the outside.
   But my biggest gripe, if I can call it a gripe, is that the only thing I could think of while I ate it was that I wished I had some hot sauce.
   I feel like a broken record lately, I feel like this is something I've been saying more often than usual here at SaBu... Yeah, I'm trying to come up with catchy abbreviations for this thing because I hate calling it "the Bully". Whatever. I feel like I keep saying that a little salt and pepper goes a long way. Have I been saying that more often lately? I don't know, is there like a movement or something? It would make sense. A few years ago, hipsters and foodies were loving salt and now maybe that shit has caught up to them with blood pressure readings that look like attempts to break the sound barrier.* So now they have to mellow shit out and ease off the sodium throttle. Maybe. Who knows what goes on in the heads of hipsters and foodies.

   I can't gripe too hard. I was recommended the baco- Wait. No I wasn't. Motherfuckin' Charlie Bartlett didn't recommend shit. He just told me one sold marginally better than the other.
   Anyway, I could have asked him to do that egg over medium if I'd known he was going to fry it instead of scramble it. But he also could have seasoned the thing. Little salt. Little pepper.
   The bread was good, the avocado was good, the cheese was meh. I'm still reeling from the muenster-pesto pairing last week so I kind of want everybody to show me what they can do with muenster and...
   No.
   Don't do it.
   Don't do it, Charlie.
   Goddamnit, Charlie, don't fucking do it! I know what you're going to do and -
I'll show you what I can do with a Munster.

   Goddamnit, dude.
   Anyway, not knocking Beancounter. It was a three dollar sandwich. But hit it with some fucking Tapatío or something. At least season the egg or cook it so the yolk is runny. That bread was magic, though. 

* OK, this is cool.

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