New Jersey’s Sloppy Joes at Town Hall Deli

In January 1919, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was ratified, calling for the prohibition of the manufacture, import, and sale of all “intoxicating liquors… for beverage purposes” in the US within one year. Later that year, the Volstead Act was passed, defining intoxicating beverages as anything containing more than 0.5% alcohol by volume. The law went into effect in January of 1920, beginning the era of Prohibition in the United States.

Many of the more affluent Americans had been stockpiling alcoholic beverages in anticipation of the new law. For many others, their thirst for booze came to be supplied by organized crime, which grew in power during this period. Still other Americans visited neighboring countries such as Canada or Mexico, where alcohol was still legally available, to meet their occasional need for a tipple. Among these countries enjoying a boost in tourism due to American Prohibition was Cuba.

After the Volstead Act was passed, enterprising Americans began opening thousands of bars in Havana, hiring American bartenders, and serving a largely American clientele. Even after Prohibition ended in 1933, Havana remained a hotspot for Americans until the Cuban Revolution and the Cold War.

One of the more prominent bars serving Americans in Havana during and after Prohibition was called Sloppy Joe’s. Opened by a Spanish immigrant named Jose in 1918, the bar became a favorite to many well-known Americans, including the author Ernest Hemingway, and in the 1950s featured in a scene in the British spy comedy Our Man in Havana between greats Alec Guinness and Noël Coward.

Local lore in Essex County, New Jersey tells the story of the long-serving Mayor of Maplewood, Thomas Sweeney, taking a trip to Cuba in the 1930s, visiting the famous Sloppy Joe’s Bar, and bringing back tales of the fantastic sandwiches he had there. According to the story, he asked the owners of Town Hall Deli in South Orange, New Jersey, to make the sandwiches for his weekly poker game. They caught on, and the deli started serving them as part of their regular menu.

Other delis in the area serve them as well–articles on the Sloppy Joe often mention the Millburn Deli, and some mention Towne Deli in Summit or Eppes Essen in Livingston. Town Hall Deli in South Orange is almost always in the conversation though, and despite a few grumbles from competitors, is somewhat universally considered the originator of the sandwich.

Which is why that’s the place Mindy and I decided to visit on our recent trip to New Jersey. After multiple flight delays; landing mid-snowstorm; arriving very very late to the bed and breakfast we’d booked in Maplewood; a deliberately light first breakfast at said B&B; a second breakfast of Taylor pork roll, egg, and cheese on an excellent roll by Balthazar Bakery at a very cute little Cafe down the street from the B&B; and a quick shopping trip to pick up a few packages of pork roll to bring home with us, we arrived at Town Hall Deli late on Saturday morning, still hungry and ready to be wowed.

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Town Hall Deli is a well-kept, sparklingly clean, very pretty little deli on a side street in the downtown area of South Orange. Traffic to the deli was slow but steady on this Saturday morning but would pick up by the time we left around noon.

Flanking the entrance and seating area are a display case of media articles about the deli, and a display case of memorabilia from the owner’s recent trip to Havana to visit the namesake bar of their famous sandwich. Photos of some of their loyal customers and families are posted along the tops of the walls, just under the tin-tiled ceiling, and various tchotchkes adorn almost every surface–not in a tacky sports-bar kind of way, but in a homey, lived-in sense.

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After ordering our sandwiches at the counter, we chose some seats by the window. A few minutes later, the friendly cashier brought us our meal. When she heard that we’d flown to New Jersey mainly to try these sandwiches, she said “My boss will want to talk to you! He was just here. Let me call him!”

So it was that we had Matt Wonski, who now owns and run the deli along with his father, sit with us and fill in some of the blanks of the history while we ate. He was excited because FIOS TV was going to be airing a segment featuring the deli that day. He told us about the byzantine liquor distribution laws in New Jersey, the limited number of liquor licenses that each town had traditionally been able to issue, and that many deals, political and otherwise in those early days shortly after the deli started making this sandwich, were accompanied by a gift of a few bottles of choice booze and a tray of sandwiches.

Meanwhile, we went to work on our sandwiches. We each ordered a half-sandwich, as a whole sandwich at Town Hall Deli appeared to mass around the same as two and a half or three regular large sandwiches. Each half-sandwich came sliced in four squares, arranged on a plate with a good briny pickle spear.

I had chosen the “Original Joe,” made with cured beef tongue, ham, Swiss cheese, cole slaw, and house-made Russian dressing on thin-sliced rye bread. Town Hall Deli gets the bread from Paramount Bakeries in Newark, where it is baked in a Pullman pan for a perfectly rectangular loaf of bread. They slice it with a meat slicer, horizontally rather than vertically, resulting in long thin flat pieces of bread much like those I bought back in December for Sandwiches de Miga. These make an excellent platform for building multi-tiered sandwiches.

Like the bread, the remaining ingredients are well thought out for constructing this type of sandwich. The cole slaw is marinated for 2-3 days then drained and dried, so that it has plenty of flavor but is not excessively wet. The Russian dressing is made in-house, from mayonnaise that is also made in-house, to a decades-old recipe that Wonski is not sharing. The dressing is spread atop the cole slaw and is separated from the bread above it by a layer of Swiss cheese and a thin swipe of butter. Thus the sandwiches can be wrapped up in paper, placed in a box, tied up with string, and shipped all over the country via Goldbelly without becoming a soggy mess.

Mindy ordered the Gourmet Joe, which uses house-roasted beef and turkey as the two sandwich meats and is otherwise constructed identically. The beef is nicely medium rare and the turkey tastes real–not the typical prepackaged deli turkey that I often describe as tryptophan-flavored jello, but thin slices of actual meat, with good texture and flavor.

Still, I much preferred the Original, with the salty and firm texture of boiled tongue and ham cutting through the crunch of the cole slaw, the solid and nutty presence of the Swiss cheese, and the slight horseradish tang of the Russian dressing. Each ingredient took its turn on the palate in both sandwiches, but while the meatiness of the beef and turkey was appreciated, the strong-flavored charcuterie of the Original worked better for me.

Matt told us his favorite was my second choice, the Smokey Joe, featuring cream cheese and smoked salmon. I was tempted to order one but as it was, Mindy and I could each only finish half of our half-sandwiches. The Sloppy Joes at Town Hall Deli measure two-and-a-half to three inches in height, so even one quarter of a half sandwich–that’s an eighth of a whole sandwich for you playing along at home–is substantial.

He insisted though that we try their cheesecake as well. I’ve been avoiding sweets, but I took a small bite of the slice Mindy ate. It was an outstanding cheesecake. While other cheesecakes are dense, this was light, not overwhelmingly sweet, refreshing rather than cloying. The cheesecake had a story as well–a long-closed business, a man who spent a year-and-a-half recreating the recipe. The deli is rich with stories, and the cheesecake was an offer we couldn’t refuse. We bought another slice to bring back to the hotel.

We had the remainder of our sandwiches packed up in paper, put in a box, tied up with string, and took them with us to check in to our hotel for our second night in New Jersey. Though Matt Wonski at Town Hall Deli had sincerely put in a good word for many local businesses, including competitors of his, our plan was to spend the remainder of the weekend having adventures in New York City, which we did, while the sandwiches awaited us in the hotel room refrigerator. Some day I will write about the sandwiches of New York. Some day.

That box of sandwiches was then placed in my backpack for the trip home, dragged through the Port Authority bus terminal (on the short list for worst places on earth, I’m fairly certain), thrown into the cargo area of a bus to Newark’s airport, where they were flagged by TSA going through security, the sandwich box and the cheesecake container both swabbed then shoved back into the backpack. The backpack itself spent the flight stuffed under the seat in front of mine, uneasily coexisting in a limited space with my feet and a bag of goodies we were bringing home for our kids. By the time we got home the additional slice of cheesecake was deformed beyond recognition. The box of sandwiches, though, went into the fridge.

And when I brought them into work on Tuesday, three days after we’d ordered them, to share with a few coworkers? They were every bit as good as they’d been that first day in South Orange. For a sandwich called Sloppy Joe, these things are engineered in such a way that they’re not very sloppy at all. I mean that as a compliment.

Perhaps we should have taken Matt’s advice, spent some time in New Jersey, even visited a few other delis to experience alternate takes on the Sloppy Joe. Millburn Deli makes theirs using oval pieces of rye bread, and cuts the sandwich into three irregular wedges to serve it. Eppes Essen replaces the cheese in the sandwich with a third type of meat in order to keep the sandwich kosher. Maybe we could have encountered a Joe that was actually sloppy.

We feel satisfied having tried the original though. Any sandwich stalwarts out there want to tell us whether we missed out?