The Sandwich Bully Tries It At Home: "The 'Anthony Bourdain' Sandwich", 25 July 2024... But First, A Lightning Round
Who the fu- Who - Who... This place looks like shit. Jesus wept, I knew I forgot to turn the lights off before I left but look at this fucking place. All fucked up, memes and screenshots and shit laying all over the place. I can't be proud of this. What the fuck is this? An empty bottle of antacids? Jesus, I haven't had to take these in nearly a year. What the fuck has been goi-
Oh! Hello, meine kleine tyrannjugend! Pardon the mess! [kicks severed hand under the copier] See, I've been gone since like a year and a half ago and according to my... [checks notes] That's right, I said I was done forever so I left nobody in charge. Meanwhile, all our old friends like Irrationally Upset Over New Arby's Menu Items Donny Osmond and Lettuce From PhoneShop...
What's that? Where have I been for the last year and a half? Why, mon frer, moya sestra, I've been livin'. Capital L livin'. L I V I - Actually, I've just been [checks notes] Oh! It says right here, yeah, I've actually been living. With an apostrophe instead of a G so I was accurate the first time. Published a couple more novels, got in a band, shoplifted from Party City, the euzh.
And I know you saw the title up top, I know you want to know, "What the fuck is "The 'Anthony Bourdain' Sandwich"? We'll get to that in a minute.
See, first I want to shout out a couple places where - What's that? Oh, sorry. Sorry, I'm being told this lightning round is being cut short because I just checked the post history and it turns out that I covered Babani's before I left, I covered Guava's too. I have a picture of a cubano and I don't know where I got it from; I assume I got it from Guava's but...
Because, you see, one of my proposed joys at the end of Sandwich Bully was that I was going to be able to sit down to eat my lunch without having to take a goddamned picture of it anymore. But old habits die hard and I found myself still trying to discreetly take a pic every time I went out for lunch for like the first couple months after I wrapped up this shit show hot mess bullshit waste of time unappreciated journal of Midwest casual dining. I took pictures and never cataloged them used them in an entry, so I have like a half dozen sandwich pics, the provenance of which I cannot vouch for.
Save for one.
Brace yourself.
That, mon frer, moya sestra, is Wally's Roast Beef from [checks notes] Wally's Roast Beef.
OK, before we go any further, is this really how we want to do the come back post? That's like the third "checks notes' joke already, right? Like I know we're not going to get in a "but the real _____" joke in with this entry but really? We're going to use the "checks notes" joke as our crutch? Really? Out of all the options we have at our dispos- What's that? We already used them with Donny and Lettuce? Oh. Didn't we have other recurring bits or - No? I pretty much ran through the list. Oh, well, OK, I guess. Let me check my - Wait. I don't have any no- I don- You're telling me that the one time it would have been good to actually have notes to actually check, I don't - What? Goddamnit, I don't have any notes for the visit I made to Wally's on 14 January 2023?
[sighs]
Well, it makes sense. I had stopped writing Sandwich Bully. Why would I have committed this visit to memory? Like right after my brother died and I was kind of wallowing in alcohol and trauma. Well, I guess I could wing it. There's something I could try. I mean, I've been back there like three or four times since that visit.
OK, so, first of all, Wally's Roast Beef (not to be confused with Wally's, a falafel place in Dinky Town, I think, or at least I think it's in Dinky Town) is located on the ground floor of an office building in some fucked up little corner of Bloomington. I don't know why, I never asked why, I don't know what goes on in the rest of the building, that's not what I'm there for.
The menu is Arby's-esque. They have roast beef, they have curly fries, they have tater cakes BUT they also have barbecue beef and turkey, they have mashed taters and gravy, they have a dinner platter with an open faced sandwich smothered in gravy. It's like an alternate universe Arby's. Like when you go to Duluth and it looks like if Minneapolis was one of those customizable Tony Hawk levels. Or how Saint Paul looks like Toledo if Toledo wouldn't have suffered a forty year economic downturn since Vietnam.
Wally's Roast Beef is the Arby's you're actually in the mood for. I know that picture is... Well, it's that picture but trust me, blad, the roast beef there is superior to Arby's. The bun is superior to Arby's. The fucking horsey sauce there? It's out for blood. This isn't some weak ass Arby's horsey sauce which is just mayo with a bit of flavor to it, no, this is the work of a fucking sadist, determined to put me in a gimp mask and clear out my sinuses. This is the horsey sauce I've been waiting my whole life for and I beg Kath at least once every other month to take me to Wally's so I can get my fix. I will, no joke, you can ask her, order two sandwiches for dine-in and four sandwiches to go and sometimes only three sandwiches make it home.
Go give them your money.
So that was our opening act. Great. Loving that. Not exactly a lightning round but that's OK, we're still getting used to this again we're sti- What? Oh, no, I'm not coming back to this permanently, I thought maybe I could just pop in once every few months, I thought... You know, because I got nothing going on today and - I mean - [sigh] Well, let's just get right into our headliner and maybe you'll see why I'm here.
Now, I have to warn you, my approach to this runway begins from a few angles and I have no real manner in which I've organized these angles.
• Angle One: "What is mortadella?"
The simple answer is: It's the bologna with the polka dots of fat in it. The good stuff has pistachios in it. But it's bologna. Don't kid yourself.
I'm intimately familiar with bologna. I've had it cold. I've had it fried. I've had it ground. I've even had it in salad form, which is just ground bologna mixed with mayonnaise and relish. Some of you are probably like "ew" but I ask you what you think bologna is when it's inside its casing. Ground meat and spices, right? And you put that on a sandwich with mayo and pickles and it's the same thing.
Don't give me that look, you eat hot dogs. You know what hot dogs are? Little bolognas.
And to the two or three of you that insist that you don't eat bologna or hot dogs because "ew, gross", go fuck yourselves. Nobody has time for your bullshit.
• Angle Two: "What is the 'Anthony Bourdain' sandwich?
It's not really his sandwich but it's become associated with his name by the food YouTubers over the last six months and it consists of mortadella, provolone, mayonnaise, and Dijon mustard on either a Kaiser roll or on sourdough bread.
•• Angle Two, Sub-Angle One: Strangely, I have a history with this sandwich.
Growing up, a common sandwich my mother would pack for our lunches would be something we called by its ingredients: Bologna and cheese and mustard and mayonnaise. I shit you not. That's what we called it. Don't get it in your head that that's what the region called it, no, that's what we called it in our house. A bologna and cheese and mustard and mayonnaise sandwich. Sometimes shortened to bologna and cheese. It consisted of bologna, American cheese, yellow mustard, and I'm fairly certain that mayonnaise and Miracle Whip were viewed as interchangeable, all on Bunny Bread. (Nobody in Toledo ate Wonder Bread unless they were some rich snob from Ottawa Hills asking for an ass kicking.) (Just kidding, I didn't know anybody from Ottawa Hills.) (But for real, the only two games in town were Bunny Bread and Nickles Bread.)
Anyway, I look at the individual components of the "Anthony Bourdain" sandwich, so named because it was his favorite sandwich, and I realize this is just the sandwich I grew up eating, just fancied up a bit.
••• Angle Two, Sub-Angle One, Sub-Sub-Angle One: I fancied this up.
Knowing that I wouldn't be able to just find mortadella anywhere, I decided, on my first day feeling relatively human after dealing with my second bout of COVID, to mask up and find this meat. I will not say where for the sake of the establishments but I had to source my meat and cheese and from two stores because each had one but not the other. I also used Duke's mayo, which should make all the southern readers here happy.
That's right, every last bastard that kept talking shit about how Hellman's is bullshit (shut your mouth) and how I need to try Duke's, a brand they never understood was not readily available in Minnesota, can rejoice that I finally found some (in a specialty shop) and decided to use that. It came in a squeezy bottle. Yep, real high-falutin' mayo you got there, southern states. Comes in a fucking squeezy bottle. But OK.
So how did the sandwich turn out?
It's a fried bologna and cheese and mustard and mayonnaise sandwich. I mean look at it. That's what it looks like.
But all the food YouTubers are losing their minds over this! It has to taste amaze-balls or whatever the fuck it is they say. Epic. GOATed. This has to be the best goddamned thing they ever tasted.
So I tasted it.
And I had to laugh.
Anthony Bourdain got all these hoity-toity gourmands and foodies - the same people who post recipes with peppers you have to source from specialty "shoppes" and tomatoes that are available for only a three week window out of every year, who insist on using artisanal bread baked in a brick oven that's been in a family for seven generations... He got them to eat a bologna sandwich.
And rave about it.
Bologna. The lunch meat they turn their noses up at, he simply found the fancy version, the version with the polka dots of fat, the only actual difference between mortadella and bologna, and because he didn't say bologna, he got them to eat bologna and then go on about how juicy and flavorful it is. The same people who put on an air like they would never in a million years eat bologna, the same people who would never make "content" for working class folks who have to brown bag their lunches, are going nuts for this fucking sandwich which, let's just be honest with ourselves and others, is fucking hilarious because mortadella is fucking expensive. The half pound of mortadella I bought cost as much as the cheese, bread, and ginger beer I bought today combined. That's right: One half pound of fresh-sliced mortadella was eleven bucks and change. It yielded one sandwich. And it tasted exactly like bologna.
And do these food influencers say that? Of course not. Then they'd have to admit that they were duped into paying an arm and a leg for a bologna sandwich. That they were promoting bologna on their channel. They have to wipe the aioli they made just for this sandwich from the corner of their mouth and say through a mouthful of sandwich they don't have the heart to swallow upon realizing they're eating bologna, "Oh, my god, this is so good!"
I didn't know Anthony Bourdain but his shows, No Reservations and Parts Unknown, along with some of his associated shows like Mind of a Chef, gave me some clue as to who he was. Sure, he could go into some three-Michelin-starred bistro and sit down to a deconstructionist meal of foamed rabbit blood and cave-aged beef BUT you always saw him lose his mind over the cachete served at some roadside mom & pop shop. Or, more accurately, mami y papi, uh, shop. He enjoyed a dim-lit woodgrain-walled bar. When he went someplace new, he didn't go to where the elite ate regularly, he went to where the everyday working-stiffs went when they had some extra scratch, he went to find out where the community ate, sometimes he went in their homes to find out what they ate.
And, inadvertently, he picked up on a simple sandwich, he fell in love with it. I have no doubt that was what truly happened.
It just happened that that came with a bonus: All the mewling sycophants and wannabes desperate to jump on trends promoted by a soulless algorithm, all those fancy fucks who saturate the bandwidth with recipes you and I can't afford, they made a sandwich that they couldn't admit to their viewers, not even to themselves, that they paid too damned much for. They couldn't admit to us or themselves, that they just ate their bologna.
SSSooo... If you want to make it, trust me, just get a pack of Oscar Meyer bologna, I'd recommend Swiss instead of provolone, Hellman's is just fine if you can't get Duke's, Dijon or brown mustard will work, and the bread? Fuck, man, pick a bread you like. I imagine this would go great on some good ass potato bread. Maybe some caraway rye. And throw a couple slices of pickles on it. Or, you know, however you like to make your fried bologna.
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