My Favorite Melt

A melt is essentially a sandwich with some kind of meat and melted cheese on sliced, toasted bread. With a few exceptions (like the patty melt, which is a cheeseburger with grilled onions on toast, or the tuna melt, which is tuna salad on toast with melted cheese on top), making a melt is as basic as making a grilled cheese sandwich (a toastie to you Brits) and sticking some meat in the middle.

Put some bacon in a grilled cheese sandwich? You’ve got a bacon melt. Ham? That’s a ham melt. Turkey melts are apparently common as well, and I’ll have to think about a round of those the next time Thanksgiving leftovers are available, if I get sick of my regular turkey, stuffing and gravy sandwiches. Or in addition to those.

But I’m not here today to explore every possible type of melt the world has to offer, much as you might like me to. I’m not even here to do the common ones. I’m here to talk about my favorite melt, the one that we lost when the late, great¹ CND Gyros in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood shut down a few years ago. I’m talking about the Gyro melt.

¹ Full disclosure: CND Gyros wasn’t really all that great. IIRC they had bad frozen food service fries and the one time I ordered Buffalo wings they were still frozen in the center. It was a dive bar in a swanky part of town where you could sit down and drink a cheap beer and eat a cheap meal. But the Gyros melt was something special.

What is a gyro melt? Take a breath, reread the first paragraph, and then come back.

OK, so the gyro melt is at its most basic, a grilled cheese sandwich with gyro meat in it. This was not a concept unique to CND Gyros though. Ronnie_suburban on LTH has mentioned a similar sandwich, and I’ve ordered another analog at a place called Poor Boy Restaurant in Kankakee recently– it was called Grilled Cheese with Gyros Meat on the menu though–and it was a poor substitute, an inch thick heap of lukewarm gyros between cheese and bread. You can’t just slap a huge pile of gyros meat into the middle of a grilled cheese sandwich and hope for the best, no matter that it appears that’s exactly what they’re going at 1:11 in this video.

There’s an art to a good melt, a balance, and it was something that CND Gyros was pretty consistently able to get right with this sandwich. Or at least that’s the way I like to remember it. and the way I want to try to recreate it.

The CND Gyro melt consisted of white bread–some people say it was Texas Toast but I don’t recall it being quite that thick–with American cheese, grilled onions, and hot, crisply browned gyros meat. It was served with a pickle and a small tub of tzatziki sauce, and I usually ordered it with some fries as well.

Here’s the thing about making your own Gyros meat: almost nobody does it. The Parthenon did but they’re gone, baby, gone. Most places will use a premade cone from one of the big manufacturers, Kronos being the most common. So if you want to make sandwiches with Gyros meat, here’s what you do: go to a fast food joint that serves gyros and order the gyros plate to go. You’ll get a pile of gyros meat in a styrofoam container with a little bit of salad, fries, and some pita. It’ll come with tzatziki sauce too. Order extra.

A pile of gyros meat

As I recall, there was a good presence of grilled onions in the sandwich, much like the golden brown piles of onions ladled onto your Polish sausage at a Maxwell street stand. It’s probably not the most appropriate choice but I decided to use a Vidalia onion, because I think they’re great and I happened to have one on hand.

Vidalia onion

Making good grilled onions at home isn’t terribly hard. Cut them up, toss them in a pan over medium-low heat with some melted butter, and make sure they don’t burn. If the pan gets too dry I throw a little water in. That helps keep them from burning and it also helps distribute the flavor and color from caramelization.

Sauteed onions

American cheese is the way to go for this sandwich, but not all American cheese is created equal. The American cheeses you buy at a deli tend to taste a little better and have a less plasticky texture than the ones you buy presliced in a package. Land-O-Lakes is a good brand, and as Mindy pointed out, is often cheerfully abbreviated on the deli label.

My cheese has a name. It’s LOL.

For my sandwiches, I chopped up some of the large stripes of gyros meat into smaller pieces, around 1″ square. Again, based on the video above, it doesn’t look like that’s the way CND did it but it’s the way I remember it. Rather than a distinct stratum of meatslabs between thin pastes of cheese, I recall a more fully incorporated sandwich. Once the onions were to my liking, I mixed in the chopped-up gyros meat and rebrowned it in the pan.

I find it easiest to quickly assemble one of these sandwiches in the pan, the reason being that before the bread is toasted rigid and the cheese is melted, transporting a sandwich full of loose meat results in a floor full of loose meat. So butter one side of your white bread and put it butter side down in the pan, then place a slice of American cheese on it.

The good American cheese. Not that other kind

Then put a good 1/2″ to 3/4″ of the hot Gyros and grilled onion mix on top.

Gyros melt

Another slice of American cheese and another slice of white bread, butter side out.

Gyros melt, before the melt part

Then just brown that sandwich really good on both sides and serve with some tzatziki and a pickle.

The fries should be bad for historical accuracy. Just say no to bad fries

My initial impressions are that the cheese-to-meat ratio is off. Maybe CND really did just pile some fresh-cut gyros meat into the sandwich after all? But I do like the way the cheese glues the meat and onions into the sandwich, and I can always make that meat layer just a little thicker, right?

Gyros melt

This is a fatty, gooey heart attack of a sandwich and it’s not something that you should eat every day. When CND Gyros was still open, there probably were people who ate one every day. It was the kind of place where they’d call you by name when you came in and have a bottle of beer uncapped at your elbow before you’d finished taking your coat off. I was never that regular a visitor but the place had that kind of vibe. It was the kind of place that you hate to see go, though the collective cardiac health of the neighborhood has probably improved since it’s been gone.

Eating this sandwich in the sun on my back patio was certainly a different experience than eating it in a dimly lit, noisy tavern. But the beer at my house was better, and everybody did know my name.

Jim Behymer

I like sandwiches.

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