I get deli sandwiches at Corti brothers grocery, maybe the best grocery store anywhere. Their sandwiches are legendary and popular such that it takes 20 minutes from the time you put your order in by pencil and paper until one of their many employees furiously assembles your lunch and wraps it in lined butcher paper.
Paper wrapped sandwiches are the best. Most of the sandwiches they serve are cold so it’s not really a factor of keeping juices contained. It’s the tightly snuggled meat-heavy cold cut submarine contained inside that requires the paper wrapper to keep the entire thing held together well enough to have any chance of fitting in someone’s mouth.
On the other hand, I can’t stand sandwiches wrapped in clear plastic wrap. They look old and soggy and messy.
A local burger joint with an unbeatable special of $7.50 for a bacon cheeseburger w/fries & a soda (no substitutions or subtractions) serves theirs in a sleeve, which makes for a far less messy lunch than without one.
I generally prefer sandwiches to be wrapped in paper, but I have always preferred my burgers to be unwrapped, and it wasn’t until fairly recently that I figured out why. A good burger is going to be a mess - if it’s not at least a little messy, it’s probably not a good burger - and I would rather scoop/dab up the blobby fallout with a french fry or even my fingers from the plate/basket rather than lick or suck the gooey cheese that is stuck to the paper wrapper. That just seems gauche and indelicate!
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CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
49
The last burger I had was wrapped but not securely. Sauce escaped onto my hand, shirt, lap, pants… Had it not had even that ineffective cover, I would have looked like a crime scene rather than a slob.
Maybe I AM French and should always use knife and fork!
Don’t you think burgers are messy in a fundamentally different way? I mean, they ooze and drip plenty, but some sandwiches (like the muffaltta in my OP) positively evacuate their innards when bitten into.
It’s this “slip sliding away” that bothers me and Paul Simon.
That’s why I kinda dig the half-sleeve that catches most of the oozy stuff. Although technically I wouldn’t need it bc I make sure to eat the burger over the tray… but a döner or gyros pita? Forget it. Shit’s gonna seep, and garlic sauce will find its way onto your freshly laundered dress or polished shoes. Sleeve, shmeeve. I always take a lot of napkins for those
I used to buy souvlaki from a street vender in NY who wrapped them so well, that I could gradually peel and eat the delicious, meat, tzatziki onions and delicious juice without spilling and go back to work without smirch. so it is possible even for a klutz like me. but you do have to hold it upright to achieve this, may be harder with a HB. My fave bahn mi is also well wrapped - they have even been known to slice after wrapping which helps when servings are split up.
Technically, no. It’s weird anglos don’t seem to have a word for it. I’m only aware of smørrebrød and Butterbrot, respectively, that refer to open-faced sammies.
Is then a croque monsieur a sandwich? Two slices of bread encasing filling then grilled with a sauce on top eaten typically with a knife and fork. And then twisted even more with the feminine variant of an added fried egg.
I’ll be 72 soon and have been eating hot roast beef sandwiches my whole life.
Went to look up a picture and google listed these two names that are completely foreign to me.
Even weirder, the manhattan includes a top piece of bread.
I learn new stuff everyday, still.
Now I need to find a REAL hit roast beef sandwich.
