On Sandwiches and Hyperbole

It’s a long, cold ride to 35th and Morgan in the Chicago neighborhood of Bridgeport from my office in the West Loop, just shy of five miles in weather that’s barely breaking into double digits Fahrenheit, but I’m on a mission. It takes me a bit over 20 minutes on a (decidedly non-athletic) Divvy bike. I’m here to try the breaded steak sandwich at Johnny O’s, and I figure I might as well give their world-famous Mother-In-Law a shot while I’m here.

There’s a carryout window attached to the main building, but I don’t particularly feel like eating outside in this weather. The awning tells me I don’t have to.

So I walk to the corner and enter the main building.

The main building is a convenience store with a sandwich counter to the right of the register. Johnny himself is at the counter and takes my order. I order the breaded steak sandwich, with a mother-in-law in lieu of fries. “Oh, you gotta have fries with the Mother-In-Law,” says Johnny, “I’ll throw some in there, on me.” That’s a lot of food for lunch but I don’t argue, I just grab a liter of bottled water from a cooler and go to the register to pay.

“How did you hear about us?” Johnny asks. (insert flashback effect)

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Tuesday evening, my phone lit up with friends of mine on social media asking my opinion about an article that had just been published. “Chicago has the best sandwich in the world,” the article claimed, “and most people don’t even know it.” The breaded steak sandwich at Ricobene’s, claimed Ted Berg, baseball writer for USA Today Sports, was the world’s perfect sandwich.

…the breaded steak sandwich from Ricobene’s in Chicago is the best sandwich in the world. Mark it down.

I had never had the breaded steak at Ricobene’s. Well, not in sandwich form–coincidentally, the previous weekend at a beer party, we’d ordered pizza from Ricobene’s and one of their signature pizza toppings is this breaded steak. It was… interesting. Thin meat surrounded by soggy carbs, sort of a meatball that’s been separated into its constituent components. Tasty enough, in its way, especially with plenty of giardiniera.

I’d never had the sandwich though, and as it happened, when I received these messages I was on my way to a meeting of my homebrew club’s board at Skylark, our favorite bar, just around the corner from Ricobene’s. Could the timing have been more perfect? I mentioned the article to some of the other board members, and our club’s president Ken was similarly enthusiastic about the sandwich, a long-time favorite of his. “You, me, after the meeting, we’ll head to Ricobene’s and split a King, some fries, maybe drink a couple of Stellas.” Sounded like a plan.

Straight up: It’s a perfect sandwich.

Ricobene’s is a long, narrow space with TVs playing ball games (the Bulls were on when we walked in–they won the game while we were eating), very clean, with a long wall of autographed celebrity headshots to establish its bonafides. Ken pointed out Da Mare right near our table.

There’s a main counter for ordering off the regular menu

As well as a separate counter for ordering pizza by-the-slice

We ordered the aforementioned King-sized breaded steak sandwich (with mozz and giardiniera), an order of fries, and pair of Stellas. It came to just under $20, which Ken insisted on paying ’cause he’s basically the best. We watched the game for a bit while we waited, only a few minutes, and then out came our order. The sandwich came triple-wrapped in foil. Once we got it open, here’s what we found.

Despite the appearance, that isn’t rice or cole slaw or even diced onions in the middle–that’s cold shredded mozzarella cheese. Maybe you have to ask special for the cheese to be melted on this presumably hot sandwich?

We dug in and… it wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t very good either; what little sauce there was had soaked into the breading, creating zones of wet bready stuff between thin meatlike striations, circling a core of crunchy, spicy, very decent giardiniera and the shredded, decidely unmolten cheese that kind of sunk the whole thing.

The cheese adds some saltiness, some gooey texture, and works to bind together a very messy mix of ingredients

This certainly wasn’t the sandwich that Ted Berg described. Any place can have an off night I guess, even though you’d think that six hours after sending this blushing tweet acknowledging the compliment of being named the greatest sandwich in the world, you’d be on your game.

Wow! What an honor! Thank you to Ted Berg and USA Today. We're at a loss for words. http://t.co/DXbsVvcwHs

— Ricobene's (@Ricobenes) March 3, 2015

I’ll give Ricobene’s this though–the fries were incredible.

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I call myself an “Internationally-recognized sandwich expert” on Twitter, but that’s mostly tongue-in-cheek. I like sandwiches, but mostly I figure the best sandwich in the world is whichever one I’m eating right now. My friends and I started this website ’cause we thought somebody ought to eat every sandwich in the world and write about them, and it might as well be us.

It’s been educational so far, but we’ve barely gotten started. We have another 4 1/2 years to go before finishing the List project. And we did get written up in a Chilean newspaper, we have been linked to by some big media sites, we are gaining our own little following, so the “internationally recognized sandwich expert” thing could be considered to be technically true, if something of a brag.

I know sandwiches, I promise.

Ted Berg’s sandwich credentials, on the other hand, are pretty good. He worked in a deli. He used to write about them professionally. He’s eaten sandwiches in 42 states and 20 countries. Presumably, he eats a bunch of sandwiches while covering baseball too, when not eating cracker jacks, big soft pretzels, or nachos out of a plastic hat. Seems like he’d know sandwiches pretty well.

Here’s the thing though: If you take breaded steak, breaded anything, you cover it in sauce, you tuck it into some bread with (melted or unmelted) cheese and then triple-wrap it in foil, by the time that sandwich hits the table, whether it’s 10 feet away or a 10-minute drive home–that breading will not be crispy. It’s just not possible, despite Ted Berg’s insistence that Ricobene’s breading pulls this trick off.

…a perfectly seasoned, tasty breading that somehow maintains some crispiness even when it’s slathered with the sweet tomato sauce

In the presence of moisture, breading crispiness dies, and when you wrap the sandwich in three layers of foil, you are essentially steaming it, accelerating the decrispification.

We try not to sling hyperbole here at the Tribunal. Most of the time. For one thing, when you make a bold statement like that, you’re bound to get some blowback. You know people are going to respond. (I certainly felt compelled to.) Chuck Sudo at Chicagoist threw down Wednesday, naming several other shops within walking distance of his apartment that made better breaded steak sandwiches and inviting Ted Berg to join him in trying them. Mike Gebert at the Reader responded Thursday, admitting that the breaded steak sandwich could be better appreciated but questioning Berg’s choice of vendor. I imagine there’s more to come. In Chicago, we know sandwiches–hell, we fetishize sandwiches–and we don’t need you telling us which ones we should be eating.

For another thing, it’s very difficult to prove something to be the best in the world, and very easy to disprove. All I have to do is find one sandwich better than yours. And the Ricobene’s breaded steak wasn’t even the best sandwich I had on Tuesday. The best sandwich I had on Tuesday, for the record, was the March special from our friends at J.P. Graziano, imported porchetta on ciabatta rolls provided by Publican Quality Bread, with lemon/caper aioli and arugula.

It’s about great bread and one great filling, with minimal interference–a little acidic boost from the aioli, a little peppery/vegetal note from the greens. Simple but amazing.

I don’t know if Ted Berg is the type of guy who’d grunt Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor-style jokes at me about real men not eating arugula, but his choice of sandwich (and his unselfconscious, unironic use of extreme hyperbole) makes me wonder.

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“Somebody wrote that Ricobene’s breaded steak was the best sandwich in the world,” I say to Johnny O, “but I didn’t care for it and a buddy of mine told me to try yours instead.”

“Well come on back, around the side there, we call that the family entrance. We’re going to remodel this whole thing,” he says as I walk around behind the counter and into their small dining area. “Let me show you to our executive table,” he continues, “you’ve got the TV and a newspaper, go ahead and change the channel if you want but don’t shut it off, I got some regulars coming in at 2 that’ll want it.” I sit down at a table with a copy of today’s Sun Times and a TV remote on it. Next to me is an autographed photo of Dennis Farina.

Business must be slow today, I think, for me to be getting all this special attention. After a few minutes, they bring me my sandwiches. The breaded steak is served in a boat, avoiding the foil wrapper issue I had at Ricobene’s (though I imagine if I’d gotten it to go, that would have been different). It’s saucier too, and the cheese is thankfully very melted.

I dig in and not surprisingly, I like it better right off the bat. I have one bite with a particularly chewy bit of meat that’s a little tough to get through, but overall the sandwich is great. A breaded steak sandwich isn’t regular lunch material–it’s more drunk food, I think, something cheap and bulky to soak up a few of the beers you’ve been pouring down your throat, but it makes for a good occasional lunchtime indulgence as well.

The mother-in-law is a tamale in a bun, smothered in chili and dragged through the garden in the style of a Chicago hot dog. It’s a bit much to eat with your hands, so they helpfully provide a fork and knife. While I’m eating, Johnny sits down across the table from me and tells me about the attention they’ve been getting the past several years over this particular sandwich.

The Learning Channel apparently has a show called Best Food Ever, and when they did a sandwich episode in 2010, they named Johnny O’s Mother-In-Law the 6th best sandwich in a field of 150.

Since then, Johnny O’s has hosted foodies from all over. A petite lady drove in all the way from Washington state and put away 3 big sandwiches, to Johnny’s astonishment. A couple flew in from Australia to try one. He’s given directions to his shop to visitors to Chicago, calling from their downtown hotels, wondering where is Bridgeport? He’s also been on Mike Gebert’s Sky Full of Bacon podcast (where I heard about Johnny O’s), and on Fox Chicago’s Cooking With Corey segment. He’s obviously proud but also a bit bemused by the whole thing, asking other employees to tell me how to find the various links.

Johnny tells me about the neighborhood. About other businesses, former neighbors, and how they’ve disappeared one by one. He talks about how the neighborhood has changed, the city has changed, about how difficult it is for a small business to stay open. He talks about the time he sang The Star Spangled Banner at Comiskey Park, walking me over to show me a photo on the wall of a younger Johnny, hat in hands, standing in front of a microphone on the field. He looks like a shorter Vince Vaughn in the photo. “You were quite a looker,” I say. He smiles slyly. “My wife still gets jealous of me,” he says.

Johnny is a charming host with a story for everything, but still manages to get to know his guests as well. He asks me where I’m from and what I do. It turns out he even knows folks down in Midlothian where I live, and we talk for a bit about Chuck Cavallini’s, a well-known restaurant in my town that closed years ago. Before I know it, I’ve finished the 2 sandwiches and most of the fries. I can’t eat another bite.

It starts to dawn on me that I’m not getting special attention. This is what it’s like to eat lunch at Johnny O’s. They knew nothing about my self-bestowed sandwich expert status or this website, though I did admit, once it came up, that it was Mike Gebert who had told me about them. I’m just some guy who came in, ordered some food, and asked for a place to sit while I ate it. The rest of it is the Johnny O’s touch.

While Johnny’s off helping a customer, another of his employees joins the conversation, a South Side Irish guy who’s working on wiring in a security camera while we talk about barbecue joints and Celtic punk bands. We also discuss more Bridgeport businesses that have closed, like Ramova Grill and Healthy Food Lithuanian. “We got the sign back here,” he says, and shows me to another area just off the dining room, where they have Ramova Grill’s sign on display. “Other places got most of their stuff, but they let us have the sign.”

I thank everybody at Johnny O’s, meeting a few more people on the way out. I get back on a bike and begin my ride back to the West Loop. It’s a 10 mile round trip, but I doubt I’m working off half of the calories I packed on during that lunch. The ride back takes 4 minutes longer than the ride there did, and I’m sleepy for the rest of the day, but it was worth it.

If the best sandwich in the world is the one in front of me, then for a short time Tuesday night, Ricobene’s breaded steak sandwich was the best in the world. But as others have pointed out, Ricobene’s is far from the only place to offer this Bridgeport specialty. I haven’t tried them all, and it’ll be a while before I think I can handle another. But to indulge in a bit of the hyperbole that I normally like to avoid, my visit to Johnny O’s was the best time I’ve had eating a sandwich for this website.