Wagshal’s is usually reliable for a sandwich. I still like their smoked brisket sandwich and the roast beef with cole slaw and russian on pumpernickel.
There is now a Pitmaster’s stand within the Wagshal’s on New Mexico Avenue (you pay for their food directly), and I was lured by an offer of $3 off the bbq pork sandwich.
I was served something that looked more like a sloppy joe, in which the sauce was most of the sandwich, and somewhere in there was some drowned meat. This was not just bad, but hideous. School lunch cafeteria stuff. Nobody would order this a second time. If for some reason this meat was actually smoked… why? Why bother? I asked for the sauce on the side, and the guy just gave me more sauce in a container. What am I supposed to do with that? No human being could possibly want more sauce.
I’ve been to Ri Ra Lamen in Chinatown once, before the pandemic, and had a very good order of dan dan mien. I was looking forward to trying their specialty lamen. Like the sloppy joe pork, this is a cynical bowl of soft mushy noodles with a dishwater broth. They know they’ll get walkup business, so they just don’t care. There is no attempt to making this something desirable or repeatable. So I won’t.
