Primanti Bros. Sandwiches

Often when we cover a city’s “signature sandwich” here at the Tribunal, there is an apocryphal origin story accompanying the sandwich, one that cannot be verified and is unlikely to be true but is nevertheless accepted lore in the sandwich’s city of origin. Other times, there is a well-documented and more realistic origin for the sandwich. In the case of Pittsburgh’s Primanti Bros. sandwiches, we have both.

The lore goes that the sandwich–a thick brace of meat and cheese topped with an order of fresh-cut fries, vinegar-based coleslaw, and sliced tomatoes swathed in chewy Italian bread–was created to service the city’s fabled steelworkers, big burly men who required an entire meal wrapped in bread. The story is almost true.

During the Great Depression, Joe Primanti started his sandwich stand in the city’s Strip District, serving produce wholesalers and the truck drivers making their deliveries. There is a “meet cute” aspect to the story of how they first started putting French Fries into the sandwiches that you can read elsewhere. In either case, the Primanti Bros. “almost famous” sandwich is a blue collar success story, having spread from its original digs in Pittsburgh to franchises all over Pennsylvania and in several other states.

Including Indiana. As it happens, there are 3 or 4 Primanti Bros. locations in and around Indianapolis, about a three hour drive from me. So despite there being a copycat restaurant right here in Chicago, mentioned previously in my post on the Chip Butty, I decided to do right by you, dear readers, and try the officially licensed copy of the original.

I pretty much came here blind. OK, I may have checked out the menu a bit, but between having to ferry the kids to and from the airport seemingly every other day this month, and building a fence and remodeling half my house, I haven’t had the time to do the kind of research I normally do. So when we arrived and sat down, I basically had to ask our waiter what the right thing to order would be.

The pastrami and cheese sandwich was his first suggestion.

The sandwiches are big, but not unwieldy. There’s a good amount of thin-sliced, warmed pastrami, a half-melted slice of provolone cheese atop it; some surprisingly good fresh-cut fries; a nice, vinegar-based slaw with a touch of sweetness; and a couple slices of tomato between two thick-cut slices of soft but sturdy white Italian bread. We were given the choice of having the bread toasted or untoasted. Toasted seemed like a better choice for a sandwich like this, though our waiter told us some hard-line old-school Primanti fans will only eat the sandwiches untoasted.

Secondly, he recommended their number one seller, the Pittsburgher. “I mean, the number two seller,” he quickly corrected himself, as the Primanti Bros’ conceit is that Iron City beer is their number one seller; it’s part of their branding. This one… is it a burger? Is it a slice of meatloaf? It is some kind of ground meat patty, denser and more homogeneous than I’d normally think of a burger as being, with the same arrangement of fries, slaw, and tomatoes on top.

Finally, I ordered the Joe, Dick, and Stanley. Supposedly a favorite of the founders, it consists of capicola, turkey, and roast beef stacked pretty high, once again with the standard Primanti accoutrements. I ordered this one untoasted as a nod to the old school.

The good: every individual component was good (with the single exception of the Pittsburgher patty). The slaw made a fantastic condiment for the salty pastrami and capicola, even the turkey and roast beef, though again, it overwhelmed the somewhat dense and nondescript meat in the Pittsburgher. The tomatoes were hardly noticeable up there on top, but provided a little additional juiciness and umami. However…

OK, maybe I’m just never going to get the starch-on-starch thing. I didn’t much care for the chip butty when I tried it, or the crisp sandwich, and neither of the sandwiches featuring tamales did it for me either. I’ll give the chow mein sandwich a pass here, because for whatever reason I found that one blandly comforting. When I bit into the Primanti, I could taste the individual components, I could tell how good each of them were, I could sense how well some of them worked together. But it didn’t feel like a single thing for me. It felt like a good sandwich interrupted by an order of fries.

As the sandwiches grew colder, that impression became more distinct. What started as a good order of fries lost its heat and crispness to the slaw blanketing it and became a flavor barrier, a soggy starchy mess of nothing that separated the more interesting parts of the sandwich above and below.

Maybe I wasn’t eating the sandwiches fast enough–I was taking pictures, and we ordered three between the two of us so it’s possible that if I’d gotten after them more quickly, I’d have had a better experience. Or maybe I wasn’t drunk enough–we had a three hour drive to get there, and consequently another three hour drive ahead of us to get home, and iced tea was my beverage of choice for the afternoon. Certainly everything was prepared very well and of good quality. Our waiter couldn’t have been nicer or more helpful. I wanted to like it. And yet…

Maybe one day I will find myself in Pittsburgh, tipsy and starving and wandering through the Strip District, no camera, no expectations, in search of a beer and a one-handed meal. Perhaps the Primanti is something that becomes situationally appropriate, and I will leave the place raving, waving the sandwich triumphantly above my head, eyes wide and small pieces of cabbage threaded in my beard. I’ve certainly changed my mind about sandwiches before after disappointing initial experiences. I hope that happens again here, and if it does, I will be sure to report back to you decrying my folly. However, I can’t say that I have a need to go out of my way to try another Primanti Bros. sandwich.