The 12″ Bari Italian Beef Sandwich
One complaint you hear a lot of the time, about places like Al’s, Portillo’s, etc., is that their Italian Beef sandwiches keep getting smaller or more expensive for what you get. They’re complaining about it on LTHForum. They’re complaining about it on Yelp. They’re complaining about it on Menupages. They’re complaining about it on blogs.
I’ve been hearing for a while that Bari has an Italian Beef sandwich now. I hadn’t been there in a while, so I decided to stop by for lunch today. The standard beef at most places around town comes on a soft Italian roll that’s 5″ or 6″ in length. Bari has 2 sizes of sandwich (apart from the giant catering sandwiches they do), 9″ and 12″, this rule holds true for the Italian Beef as well. Never mind 12″, a 9″ Italian Beef is enormous. But anything worth doing is worth overdoing as I always say.
A 12″ Italian Beef sandwich? From Bari? With Bari giardiniera? Unbelievable, gonna knock me on my ever-growing backside for sure!
Well, maybe not. I asked for mine “wet and hot” (I like my beef like I like my… oh never mind). “Beef with hot” was the response and the guy was away before I could say anything. I wasn’t even sure he’d heard the 12″ part, which I was still having a hard time wrapping my head around.
Well, I did get a 12″ Italian Beef sandwich. It might not have fared well on the ~15 minute trip back to my office–but on the other hand, this is not a sandwich that’s about crisp textures, etc. The additional time should have given the gravy more time to soak into the bread along with the giardiniera oil, and for all the flavors to meld together. Conceptually, an Italian Beef sandwich ought to travel pretty well, at least for a short period of time.
This is just a damned big sandwich
Item the first: This is a damned big sandwich. It may not be as overstuffed with beef as some places, but if it were, could I have finished it? There is a length vs. girth metaphor somewhere in here to be teased out if I only had the stomach for it. Here it is with a familiar item for scale:
Yes that’s a standard Rubik’s Cube. I’m trying to give you a sense of scale here.
Item the second: It was not as wet as I’d have liked. The roll was decent, soft/chewy as is usual with an Italian Beef, rather than the crusty baguette I prefer with a sub. I don’t know what bread Bari uses for their subs these days–they used to use d’Amato’s from next door, the gold standard of sub sandwich bread in Chicago as far as I’m concerned, but I understand that is no longer the case. I’m not sure what they use for the beef sandwiches. It was fine, but you can see that they were sparing with the gravy.
Cross section.
It’s apparent that this sandwich wasn’t dipped at all, but that’s my bad for not asking for it dipped. I guess “wet” indicates to ladle the gravy into the sandwich rather than dip it, though I always thought of it as meaning “even wetter than dipped, basically I want soaked gravy bread with meat.” I’ve always asked for my beefs wet and gotten a nice, gooey, disintegrating wreck. There is some gravy apparent at the bottom of the roll, though not as much as I was looking for. It appears that this might be not so much a communication error as just me asking for the wrong thing. So I’ll ask for it dipped next time and see what happens.
Item the third: the beef. It was fine. Beefy, not overly seasoned, more like a Mr. Beef than an Al’s. It would have been great with sufficient additional flavor, moisture and heat from the gravy (whoops!) and giardiniera. Which brings us to…
Item the fourth. If they were stingy with the gravy, they were extra stingy with the giardiniera. You can see a bit there at the bottom of the bun but I wasn’t sensing its presence. Part of this might be because Bari giardiniera is much less crisp than most. I guess I’m a bit of an outlier here–I appreciate Bari’s giardiniera, I like its flavor, but the softer texture of the vegetables kind of kills it for me. It’s always been good on an Italian sub, but that’s a bit thinner sandwich and they’ve always laid it on. I opened one half of this sandwich before starting to eat it and spotted one lonely piece of cauliflower.
Look,. there it is, all the way to the left. Kind of tucked under?
Yes, I know, they’ve got it under the beef, but trust me, there wasn’t much there.
Conclusion: Look, I devoured this sandwich. It was good, very good even. I had my expectations high, and I messed up my order, and I have a few notes for next time, but I ate this mile-long slab of bread and beef for lunch and it set me back less than 10 bucks. It’s been a couple of years since I ate at Bari for lunch (probably since we moved out of my office in River North, which made for a quick trip down Grand Ave.), but I won’t take as long to go back.
Obligatory macro shot
I like sandwiches.
I like a lot of other things too but sandwiches are pretty great
Recent Comments