Angela Sinclair

Gallo Blanco is known primarily for their street tacos, not their sandwiches, but boy do they make a mean torta. Located inside the Clarendon Hotel, it’s an odd place to find a mostly-locals hangout, but you can attribute the draw to the great food. House-made aquas frescas, tacos, breakfast served all day. I’d go on forever about the chilequiles verdes but this is a sandwich blog. My husband and I went for brunch over the weekend, so at this particular meal, I got a breakfast sandwich, the El Flaco Torta, which contains egg whites scrambled with locally-made chorizo, lettuce, tomato, and avocado, served on toasted telera bread.

Don’t let the egg whites fool you into thinking this is a virtuous sandwich; the chorizo makes up for that. While eating this sandwich the word that came to mind above all others was “balanced.” It’s rich and savory, with the avocado adding creamy sweetness, the tomato just enough tang, and the iceberg lettuce, which I usually hate in all forms, providing a nice crunch. Plus, if you’ve never had telera bread, it’s an extremely soft roll that when toasted in butter provides the perfect wrapper. You’ll need the paper this sandwich comes in, because it’s delightfully drippy and messy.

Gallo Blanco also does a grilled ribeye and egg torta, a cochinita torta (my favorite), and a carne asada torta, which can add be made “enfrijolada” (with beans). If you can’t handle the full rich deliciousness, order the half tortas. These tortas would be perfect hangover food, but you definitely don’t need one to enjoy them.

Angela Sinclair, our gal in Phoenix:

Pane Bianco is the daytime sandwich place owned by Chris Bianco of Pizzeria Bianco fame (you know, Best Pizza in the country, 4-hour waits). They only serve three sandwiches. Four, if you count the daily special. Toss a couple of salads in there and it’s a pretty small offering, with only-outdoor picnic table seating that gets pretty warm in the summer. Still, it’s usually packed, and it’s not hard to see why when you bite into one of their sandwiches. The three everyday sandwiches include caprese, tuna, and sopprassetta. My favorite is the caprese. I’ve had none better outside of Italy, and even then, sitting on the warm stone of the Sienna plaza, I may have been romanced by the setting.

These sandwiches aren’t complicated. The caprese is the traditional mozzarella, tomato, and basil. It’s just the every part is so damn near perfect. The mozzarella is house-made daily, and is pure milky sweetness. The basil (from Bianco’s herb garden) is used like lettuce here: a thick layer of leaves. Their bread is a round of pizza dough, baked to order in a wood-fire oven then seasoned with just enough salt. The tomatoes come from local farmers. It’s the Platonic ideal of the classic, lovely in its freshness.

The day my husband and I went to review, he got the ‘market sandwich’, that day a local roasted pork, arugula, and chow-chow (a pickled vegetable relish). It came on the same round pizza bread, which makes for flat, dense sandwiches. The richness of the shredded roasted pork was nicely balanced by the bite of the arugula and tanginess of the chow-chow. Kyle described it as “perfect.” Not pictured here, both of their other sandwiches are also awesome. The tuna is known by several friends as “crack tuna” for its addictive qualities, and the sopprasetta (a red wine salumi) is salty, meaty, and covered with sweet roasted onions or peppers, depending on the season. Overall, Pane Bianco- best sandwiches in Phoenix.

Not exactly the same world of flavor as their tri-tip, but nearly an equally delicious sandwich. I don’t do chicken salad in general, mostly because I like chicken enough on its own and don’t want it dunked in mayo. That said, this is like the best tuna sandwich ever, in the sense that I do like tuna sandwiches and think the mayo in them is necessary. Except it’s chicken. ‘Chicken of the Sea’, yes? ‘Tuna of the land’ here.

The greatness includes their classic cilantro-garlic dressing, fresh vegetables, some real swell chicken, yes yes, all very good for sure. But the three things that go the extra mile and differentiate this thing are: a: The bread. Holy shit this is the best bread. It’s huge and soft and malleable and the crust is just to die for. And b and c: the kernels of corn and bits of carrot in the chicken salad. Crunchy is right: but it’s not really the chicken that’s crunching. It’s everything else.

[Applause]

Sometimes I just feel like this is the best sandwich ever. Brasil Cafe hooks it up with marinated tri-tip chunks on a soft roll slathered in cilantro-garlic dressing, with grilled onions, pickled jalapenos, bits of pineapple and green olives, and a sort of queso fresco. The lettuce and tomato aren’t even really necessary, but in every bite they only add to the perfection. Why do all these things work? Don’t know for sure, but I could probably eat this thing every day.

If this is a traditional sandwich somewhere in Brasil, I need to go to Brasil. Otherwise, this place is steady bending sandwich rules and acting like it’s normal. A couple years back National Geographic even chose this thing as The Best Sandwich, and named the establishment as one of the world’s top-ten cafes. Wow. Most honorable.

The East Bay’s proudest staple of sandwichdom: Bakesale Betty’s Fried Chicken Sandwich. Like some sort of enormous, gleaming beacon in the minds of sandwich-eaters everywhere, it brings an out-the-door line of followers each lunch hour. The question of why it’s so effing brilliant requires a nuanced answer. First, know that this sandwich is a ‘simple pleasure’. Bread, meat, slaw. Hot sauce optional.

Then consider that the bread (an elegant little torpedo roll) is fresh-baked from the same kitchen in which the other elements are made. It’s real soft. The chicken breast filets are tender and juicy (I’m thinking they’re brined or buttermilked before they’re fried), the breading on them is perfectly textured (meaning there’s enough of it, and it’s not so crunchy that it slows your chewing). And the slaw! Cabbage, red onion, jalapeno, parsley (or is that cilantro?) in a light vinegar-oil dressing. No mayo. That’s right. I’ve always had one tiny bone to pick with this sandwich, though: why not a more flavorful breading? I guess it’s unnecessary because everything else is so great. But my favorite breadings are spiced-out.

CK’s Smokehouse is a catering biz with a tent at Firehouse Art Collective’s Weekend Live Bazaar, on Adeline in Berkeley. For $7 I got a couple slices of wheat bread, some sauced-up 8-hour beef ribs, and a side of baked beans. Good stuff!

I could’ve personally gone for a spicier sauce, or reached for a bottle of hot sauce had one been around, but the meat itself was right-on and the baked beans were nice and sweet. Dude said he cooked them with turkey for that special flavor? Go CK.

The Sacred Wheel has a neat little grilled cheese sandwich deal: $3 for a small, $6 for a large, or a half and some soup for $5. Their cheese selection is well-curated, with the coolest Northern California brands represented, though cheese selections are pretty good anywhere north of Grand Ave. these days. I tried the small with gruyere and coppa (add a buck). The wooden plate it came on was snazzy, the price reasonable relative to the sandwich’s quality.

Pressed and crispy, with just the right amount of coppa bite. They say the goat gouda is nice on the grilled cheese as well. Since they’re generous with their samples, I tried the gouda on its own, and found it scrumptious. Next time!

So yeah, The Mixing Bowl. Bright pink cabbage slaw, decent local bread, a great side salad. And, well, a pretty good go at pulled pork. Can’t complain about the portions here, either. Good cafe.

But another ‘BBQ’ sauce with a ketchupy base? Let some Carolina in your soul over there! Let the pork speak to us through mustard, vinegar, a spice blend for a change! I mean unless you really like that sort of thing. Happens to the best of us.

The Mixing Bowl has some well-portioned sandwiches and a ton of homemade foods that all look pretty great. The owner’s dad’s honey, the jam, the salads (nice portion of mint in the one I had). Bomb dressing too. While their tri-tip doesn’t hold a candle to Pedro’s Favorite up at at Brasil Cafe, it’s a touch better than the one Marc 49’s got across the street. For the price. The amount of meat is solid, the balsamic’d onions do the trick, and the bread is… well, good bread. The tri-tip is cooked nicely.

Those things said, the tri-tip doesn’t have a very marinated flavor (a personal sandwich-specific preference, I know). Also where the tomatoes could have had a riper flavor and gone with the onions, they instead tasted refrigerated, or just… not tasty enough for raw consumption. Maybe the wrong variety even? At home I would have just used heirloom tomatoes, or cut any old tomato into a vinegar-oil-red onion thing and let the other flavors take over the tomatoes’ surface area. Not as pretty a cross-section that way, but hey.

“Thinly sliced steak and sauteed onions, avocado, swiss cheese and
garlic mayonnaise on french bread.” Grass-fed, “all-natural” beef. One of the best. The steak is among the tenderest, freshest I’ve had on a sandwich. The spicey, garlicy, sweet aioli keeps you from setting the thing down while eating. Sweet onions that just go. Avocado and cheese keeping your fruit and cow fats in the game.

It’s something.

It’s a solid shrimp sandwich: “The Puerto Rican Po’Boy. Breaded, fried prawns on toasted french bread with lettuce, tomato and cilantro-lime mayo. We use rice flour and plantain for breading.” All good flavors. They seem to use plantain for a number of different preps, including the thin, snacky plantain chips, which rock. The nice thing about this was the body of the shrimp: thick, just cooked-enough, not dry. Splendid really.

On the same visit we also ordered their corn flour-fried portobella mushroom with marinated spinach, tomato, vegannaise & ketchup on a whole wheat bun. And a side of delectable yams! Definitely awesome. The spinach was fantastic with the friedness and the veganaise, and the portabella was nice and meaty.

Souley Vegan is a great restaurant disguised in the veil of a local, vegan fast-casual walk-up joint with moderately-paced eat-in service. Good meatless, dairyless soul food shouldn’t be much of a stretch on the imagination, considering the inherent heartiness of yams, collard greens, baked beans, cornbread, cornflour batter, thick barbecue sauces, peas, lentils, spinach, cobbler. Their house-made lemonade with cayenne pepper and strawberry juice with raw ginger; their ingeniously flavored, pleasantly light potato salad all deliciously help to cut the heft of the main dishes. Pretty much everything we’ve tried has been tasty. I guess okra is always a little slimy?

But this is a true work of craft. Half toasted-and-barbecue-sauced tofu, half deep-fried tofu patty, with veganaise, ketchup, pickle, and lettuce on a whole wheat bun. Like a good aromatic garden burger or a dense, well-flavored walnut patty, you can lie back and forget about beef. The flavors, it follows, must start at the center’s proteins, then go fatty and sweet, then pickly and sweet again, then watery, then crisp, and then fatty and sweet again. Definitely a new favorite Oakland sandwich!

Controversy: is this sandwich beautiful enough? My feeling is: it’s probably not. But what does beauty even mean in a sandwich? It’s nowhere near the most important criteria. This one’s very pretty, very simple, it functions well as a meal, it’s relatively healthy, and it was cleverly flavored. We took a hike in Marin up the side of Tamalpais and Martha Gossage of Petaluma (raised in Texas) brought these along for everyone. I was skeptical, but the flavor proved itself immediately.

Egg salad with a little mayo fat, sweet little chunks of apple, and green olives with pimiento. A little salt and pepper to taste, and just a hint of onion or garlic powder for mystery. Apparently egg salad combos like this are pretty common in the South, depending. Thanks, Martha!

Usually I’d avoid sprouted wheat. Like at a deli, or wherever I have a choice. But it’s actually good for tuna and egg salad sandwiches, because you can drench it in the salad’s juices (extra saffola in mine please, though I’m generally not a mayo enthusiast) and it only gets better, keeping its integrity and holding the flavor.

In high school I lived off tuna-garlic-saffola mayo sandwiches for my first year & a half, using only sprouted wheat because my parents at that time were ‘health geeks’, a self-imposed and burdensome lifestyle that I prefer not to think about, unless my thinking about it includes the times we actually went out for fast food (because it was cheap, a common reason for breaking with principle) and the times we got Mexican or Chinese which, being ‘non-white’ options, were somehow associated with being more acceptable.

Always had to toast the sprouted bread to get myself to enjoy it, at first. Stopped doing that when it had to last until lunchtime in my backpack, in which case you go heavy on the salad and raw with the bread, or else it becomes unnecessarily chewy. Poppyseed wheat is probably the better alternative.