A Tale of Two Sandwiches

The other day, I had a very good sandwich from the French Market. The same day, I had an equally horrible one. I’d like to focus on the positive as much as I can, but beware. I’m still ticked off about my lunch that day and I’m not going to make it out of this post without cursing. There are swears ahead. You’ve been warned.

The night before, I’d been up until 1:30am making bratwurst for an upcoming party. Exhausted, I zombie-walked right past my alarm clock without setting it and toppled halfway into bed, passed out. The next morning, I still managed to wake up on time-ish but late enough that once I’d showered and dressed, I had to zoom out the door without grabbing any breakfast or prepping a lunch.

Luckily for me, not only do I work directly across the street from Chicago’s French Market, I also have this blog to justify buying fancy sandwiches even when maybe I should be a bit more frugal.

Breakfast

So I arrived at Washington & Clinton around 8am, docked my Divvy bike, and headed into the Market looking for breakfast, hoping for a sandwich. I stopped by Delightful Pastries and asked if they had any breakfast sandwiches. I was told that they’d been serving them at their Farmer’s Market outpost and they intended to roll them out at the French Market location soon. Today, though, I was out of luck. Fair enough. I’m definitely looking forward to trying one once they’re available here.

Next door was Bebe’s Kosher Deli. Their sign advertised a bagel with cream cheese and lox. I did not see any lox in evidence but did see a vaguely pinkish spread, so I inquired first. “Is your lox actual lox, or just a lox spread?” He assured me that they had real lox tucked away in a fridge–I’m guessing what I saw must have been some kind of berry-flavored cream cheese, ugh–and I said “Sign me up!”

He asked if I wanted the bagel toasted. I know people have Opinions about this and I must have hesitated just long enough that he rushed to assure me, “These were just baked this morning, about 2 hours ago.” So I asked for it untoasted. Chive cream cheese, lox, tomato, onion on a garlic bagel.

oh man are you drooling? I’m drooling

This was the best thing I could have done for myself that morning. I’m sure a real bagel aficionado could take one look at the crumb and be able to tell me nasty stories about the baker’s ancestry but I thought it was a pretty good bagel. Chewy with a bit of a crust. Solid enough that it kind of squished the ingredients out the sides if I wasn’t careful but that happens with a bagel sandwich.

I’m not an expert on lox either, but from the mild amount of salt and the smokiness I’m going to venture a guess that this was Nova Lox. I understand “real” lox isn’t smoked. I like the smoke, so I’m fine with Nova. I somewhat regret not adding on the available cucumber slices, but not really. This was a handful of a sandwich already.

Not to mention that I got a black & white cookie too

The black & white cookie that I couldn’t help but add on at the register (“also baked this morning! They’re my favorite” said my friendly sandwich guy) was decent enough, but again, my lack of a basis for comparison renders any opinion I might have on its authenticity suspect. It was tasty, but not a type of cookie that I generally favor, being of the soft cakelike variety. It was, however, a nice treat along with my coffee.

Bebe’s, you’re alright. You’ll be seeing me again.

After a breakfast like that, is it any wonder that I went back a bit on the late side for lunch? Not super late, it was before 1:30 pm, but outside the busier part of lunch time. I should have known better probably. I should have rethought my plan. I could have gone to Saigon Sisters or Pastoral in the Market instead. I could have bypassed the market entirely and headed over to J.P. Graziano, or the newly opened west loop Cemitas Puebla location. I could and should have pursued any number of alternatives.

I’d been to Fumare on several occasions previously. Mostly, they’d been great experiences. The smoked meat there has been rightly written up locally as being destination lunching, something you’d ride the train downtown just to try. I have had a good few experiences that backed that up. However…

A caveat

My most recent experience with Fumare Meats in the French market before this week was a bad one. It was bad enough that I hadn’t been back in a few years. 3 years? That’s probably about right.

On my previous excursion, when I asked for the pastrami (er, “Montreal smoked meat“) on rye, they insisted that I take a cold pre-made sandwich from their display case. Maybe they were out that day, I don’t know. They could have said “Hey, we don’t have any left, but I put some of the last meat into these sandwiches here if you want one.” That would probably have been an OK way to deal with it.

Instead, not only did they flat-out refuse to make me a fresh sandwich, I was told that they don’t make sandwiches to order and I should take what I was offered. Which I knew to be bullshit. I’d been there before. I’d watched them make my sandwiches. I knew this to be false. Then, when I raised an objection, they acted like I was the asshole.

Look, I know I can be an asshole. I try not to be. I think I wasn’t being one at that moment in time, but of course my memory of the event may be treating me better than I deserve. In general, I try to be as nice as I can to people in the service industry, having many bad memories of nightmare customers from my time in the game. I don’t want to be that guy, but I have to recognize the possibility that, on occasion, I have been. For what it’s worth, I’m very sorry if you have ever encountered me in that capacity, or in any situation for that matter, when I have been less than polite. As much as I hate to admit it, it has happened.

Lunch

But that incident was some time ago–3 years, did we decide?–and was hardly on my mind at all when I ordered my “Montreal smoked meat on rye” that afternoon. Yellow mustard or dijon? Yellow for me please. They charged me eleven dollars, wrapped up my sandwich to go with a napkin and a small tub of yellow mustard with a plastic knife to spread it. I walked back across the street to my office, looking forward to a great lunch.

My first bite was pretty good. Some tender meat and, hey, a crunchy bit! Oh, I like crunchy bits. My second bite, more crunchy bits. Third bite, crunch crunch. Snap crackle & pop. (Note to self: patent “pastrami breakfast cereal” idea) By the time I was finishing the first half of the sandwich, I noticed that the crunchy bits were not only outnumbering the tender ones, they were all that was left, and not all of them were meat.`

Hey look there is some edible meat on the bottom

I estimate the interior of this sandwich to have been composed of roughly:

• 35% pastrami, somewhat dry but with a few nice pieces of fat, mostly shredded rather than sliced.
• 50% dried out pastrami, said dryness ranging from “chewy but edible” to “pink stuff formerly known as meat” to “razor sharp shards of gum-puncturing ex-meat”
• 15% burnt, desiccated bits of dry spices & herbs that had once been adjacent to meat. Coriander. Black peppercorns. Bay leaves. Essentially twigs, leaves & seeds.

(Note to self: scrap “pastrami breakfast cereal” idea, what were you thinking?)

The other side was not a fluke

Do I have a JERK sign on my head? Do I look like a goat? Or can it possibly be that you have not trained your staff to recognize whether your product is even edible? And look, I’m not the only person this has happened to.

Fumare, I’m done. I will never spend another dime on the shit you’re slinging. In retrospect, this sandwich wouldn’t have been worth eleven dollars if it had been all tender moist juicy meat. It wouldn’t have been worth a trip across the street if a genie had jumped out of my mustard tub to grant me three wishes.

To charge me eleven dollars for detritus scraped from a cutting board onto a piece of bread–stuff I wouldn’t feed to a dog, stuff that should have been scraped into a trash can–and smile at me while you’re doing it, that is contempt. It’s worse. That is a complete lack of respect for someone as a fellow human being, much less a customer who is paying you for goods and/or services. It’s literally adding insult to injury when you charge too much for “meat” that actually causes bleeding in my mouth.

Again, if you don’t have sufficient meat left to make me a fresh sandwich, let me know. Don’t foist your scrapings onto me and charge me the full going rate. According to the old saying, this was the second time so shame on me. But no. We both know better.

Fuck you, Fumare. Never again.

Jim Behymer

I like sandwiches.

I like a lot of other things too but sandwiches are pretty great