Wraps of the World

In April of 2019, Bloomberg published an article, “The Best Sandwiches In New York, as Picked by Top Chefs.” In laying out their guidelines for what constituted a sandwich, they had this to say:

Even if New York state will put a burrito under the sandwich umbrella, Bloomberg Pursuits will not. For the purposes of this story, we have defined a sandwich as including any kind of bread, whether pita or biscuit, and almost any kind of filling. We drew the blurry line at burgers and most definitely didn’t include hot dogs or lobster rolls.

However, in that same article they picked these things that could only be considered wraps. A Mujadara wrap from the deli above Kalustyan’s Spices. A stuffed “bang” or Chinese-style flatbread from Momofuku’s Bang Bar. (They also notably snubbed the Dennis from Parisi Bakery, but hey, what do I know? I don’t live in New York, I just visit)

So burritos and hot dogs and lobster rolls aren’t sandwiches, but wraps are?

Here’s the thing: Burritos are a kind of wrap. This is self-evident.

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I’ve always kind of side-eyed the fact that wraps are so easily mentioned alongside sandwiches, but on the other hand, I can think of several items we’ve covered over the years, delicious favorites, things I’ve lobbied so hard to have included in the halls of the sandwich, that are clearly other types of wrap.

For instance, Gyros are wraps. You have your meat, your onion, your tomato, and your sauce, and they are wrapped in a pita. This is not a particularly difficult assertion to grasp.

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Structurally and ingredient-wise, Souvlaki are nearly identical to Gyros. They are also wraps.

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If we allow that Gyros and Souvlaki are wraps, and we follow that taxonomical link back to their origins, we must also agree that many if not all Doner Kebabs are also wraps.

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From the Doner Kebab, we can follow another evolutionary chain to discover that Shawarma are wraps as well.

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Falafel “sandwiches,” structurally and culturally a close yet vegetarian relative of shawarma, are thus wraps as well.

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Among my most controversial assertions has been including tacos in the ranks of sandwiches. Tacos al arabe and al pastor are also descended from shawarma and thus must be wraps. In fact, structurally speaking, there is little to distinguish tacos from gyros–the bread is different, the ingredients as well, but they are presented and wrapped in much the same way. Closing the circle, then, tacos–the burrito’s diminutive elder brother–are wraps as well.

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So why, when I’ve pushed so hard to include all these other delicacies in my own personal sandwich canon, has it been so hard for me to include wraps as well?

I suppose I have a bit of a mental block there. So many places I’ve seen offer wraps as merely an afterthought–“For a healthy alternative, many of our sandwiches/salads can be served as wraps.” 7-11s and other convenience stores carry carelessly premade wraps in their refrigerators. (They also carry carelessly premade sandwiches, I know). But perhaps I can trace it back to my disdain for the presumption the chain Roly Poly showed when they opened in my hometown calling themselves a “Sandwich” shop and yet only offering wraps. Not a slice of bread in sight!

So I’m here humbly, admitting that I don’t know everything, and trying to open my mind (and my stomach) to the sandwichness of Wraps. I started the month of March by searching local menus for wraps that were not merely an afterthought, a re-engineered sandwich or salad, but were designed and implemented as wraps from the start. I found a few, and made a list of places to try.

Then the world went sideways, and I didn’t get to try them all.

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First, though, Mindy and I made our way to The Wrap Bar at 82nd & Cottage Grove, just a block up the street from Dat Donut and Uncle John’s BBQ.

Inside, it was a small counter-order shop with 5 or 6 tables, doing both dine-in and carryout business. There were eight or so wraps on the menu, along with a couple of sandwiches, several salads, and some desserts. Each wrap comes with a small bag of chips but they also offer fresh-cut French fries, made to order. Mindy and I ordered a wrap apiece along with drinks and an order of fries to split. Without asking or being prompted, the fries came with small tubs of hot sauce and mild sauce on the side, immediately endearing me to the place.

Each wrap was offered with an option of a flour tortilla, spinach tortilla, or sun-dried tomato tortilla as a wrapper. For our first wraps, Mindy and I both elected to stick with the flour tortilla. She ordered a salmon wrap, featuring flaky cooked salmon with lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise, and onion.

My first choice was the jerk chicken wrap, which had mildly spicy jerk-seasoned chicken along with the requisite onion, tomato, lettuce, and a sprinkling of shredded yellow cheese.

Mindy’s salmon wrap was quite juicy and balanced, almost salad-like, with a heavier hand on the vegetable components, while my jerk chicken wrap had a decent but approachable spice level and enough chicken to satisfy. We were surprised by how much we liked everything.

We ordered a couple more to take away for our son (and just because I wanted to try more of the menu), and despite a 20 minute drive home from Chatham, these were also quite good by the time we got around to eating them. Ian wanted the Buffalo chicken wrap, without the tomato or onion, with the flour tortilla as we’d had.

I did not partake of Ian’s wrap but he was quite happy with it. I did, however, dig into this Chicken Caesar wrap with the sun-dried tomato shell.

In addition to the breaded chicken, the Caesar wrap had flakes of Parmesan cheese, Romaine lettuce, and a Caesar dressing powerful enough to cut through all of the above, applied with care, but not stingily. It was fantastic as well.

These wraps were… surprisingly, shockingly good. I honestly did not expect to like any of the wraps I tried this month, but the first ones I had were spectacular. Is this what all wraps taste like? Could it be that I’ve been wrong about them all along?

(No. I was not. The Wrap Bar is exceptionally good.)

The next day, we visited another restaurant with the word “Wrap” in its name. Rock Wrap & Roll in Lincoln Park is one of those Pan-Asian restaurants with Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese dishes on its menu. There is a prominent sushi bar in the back of the dining room, and while the menu does focus largely on Japanese items and sushi in particular, they have a good selection of Thai dishes and appear to put some care into their non-Japanese fare as well.

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I bring up how attractive and well-made their dishes are in general if only to contrast the absolute lack of thought or care that went into the Teriyaki wrap I ordered.

The Teriyaki wrap consisted of a well-grilled tortilla stuffed with lettuce, plain unseasoned rice, plain unseasoned gray beef, plain undressed lettuce, and half-cooked strips of green pepper, alongside a small tub of extremely thick and sticky teriyaki sauce. None of these things appeared to have been intended to be put together, and while the wrap was plated in a somewhat attractive manner, the execution of the wrap and its contents couldn’t have been more slapdash.

I suppose I may deserve it for ordering a sandwich or wrap at a pan-Asian restaurant (or for ordering anything at a pan-Asian restaurant, but I digress). However, this place has the word Wrap in its name! I had hoped for more, and was especially disappointed after such a promising first stop.

The style of wrapping was also sloppy. There are largely 3 styles of wraps (though of course there are outliers, as with anything). You’ve got the burrito-style, with both ends (or one end if you’re Taco Bell) tucked in to contain the filling. The wraps from The Wrap Bar fell into this category. There’s the taco style, where the filling is loosely cupped in an open flatbread. Gyros and souvlaki are usually wrapped this way. There’s what I suppose I can call the flauta style, sticking with the Mexican food theme, where the ends are open but the wrap is otherwise deceptively enclosed. That was the style of the Rock Wrap & Roll wrap, and it resulted in a wrap that lacked structure and quickly ejected its contents.

A better example of an Asian wrap is the bulgogi burrito I order from time to time at the food truck Bop Bar. It’s somewhat inconsistent, and I do wish they’d griddle the tortilla a bit, but it’s a solid lunch option when they’re near my office (and when the world is running as normal and I am able to work in an office).

This also contains plain white rice, but the beef is marinated ribeye steak, the carrots and lettuce are dressed, the pink stuff is pickled radish, and the whole is wrapped tightly burrito-style rather than loose with the ends open. Plenty of flavors there, and an easy-to-eat package.

South Asian flavors are well-represented in the world of wraps as well. I stopped by the downtown Chicago location of Bombay Wraps earlier this month to try a few. Bombay Wraps serves a variety of Indian-style dishes–lamb curry, chana masala, chicken tikka, etc.–wrapped in roti or paratha (or over rice, or a salad, or a bread roll) with a choice of condiments. This could be said to be an Indian type of wrap called a kati roll, but given the fast-casual treatment. I ordered wraps with the lamb curry and the paneer in tikka masala.

The wraps can be prepared with chosen condiments but there are also a set of preferred toppings for each dish, which I find more admirable than the chaos of the typical fast-casual menu. Too much is made of the “have it your way” style of fast-casual, from the endless combinations available at your basic Chipotle or Subway to the more focused menus of the average “Mediterranean” fast-casual joint. There are certain flavors that go well together, and one of the things a restaurant should be good at is recognizing which ones and suggesting those combinations. Then, if the consumer wants to take this vegetable out or add this sauce in, let them! At least there’s a default expectation.

The Paneer wrap came with a spicy coriander chutney and pickled onions. The cheese and tikka sauce made a soft rich combination, so the acidity of both the chutney and the pickled onions was a welcome counterpoint, and the combined heat of the tikka sauce and chutney was not bad for a chain.

The lamb curry wrap also came with the coriander chutney and pickled onions, but added a salad of lettuce and red cabbage. In both cases, the wraps were on smaller paratha type flatbreads, and wrapped in the taco style. Another similar downtown fast-casual restaurant, Naansense, does the same thing with what they call “naan” bread. (I do not recommend Naansense.) Bombay Wraps is decent, but left me wanting something a little more authentic. We planned to hit Anmol on Devon for some of their wraps when we had the time to get up there. In the meantime, we went someplace a little more easily accessible for us, Tandoor Char House in Lincoln Park.

Tandoor Char House’s decor came across very Lincoln Park yuppie, very upper middle class date night, BYOB with corkage fees, trendy, dimly-lit, dark tablecloths. The food to some extent transcended that impression, but not completely. Shortly after we were seated, we were brought, gratis, a pair of papadums with coriander and tamarind chutneys; raita, a cooling yogurt sauce seasoned with cumin and herbs; and achar, a spicy condiment of pickled green mango that our waiter called “Indian giardiniera.” The chutneys were thin and forgettable, and the raita was fine, but the achar was great, and the papadums were crisp and redolent of asafoetida.

We ordered a tandoori chicken wrap and a lamb kebab wrap. The wraps were offered with either paratha, chapathi, or naan. As much as I love naan, I find it to be a bad choice for a wrap, so we ordered one with paratha and one with chapathi. For the life of me I can’t remember which we ordered with which, nor identify them from the photos. I think the chicken got chapathi and the lamb got paratha. Both wraps came with chaat fries, which were essentially curly fries seasoned with a chaat masala that is slightly spicier than the average curly fry seasoning.

In the meantime, this completely empty restaurant seated the next couple to come in at a table directly next to us–I had to keep my elbows close to my sides to avoid bumping into them–rather than at any of the other 20 or so unoccupied tables in the restaurant. The chicken wrap was pretty good. The lamb was OK. The achar made both better. We couldn’t get out of there fast enough. We resolved to get up to Devon as soon as we could.

We would not make it to Devon in the month of March, sadly.

We did, however, order wraps whenever we could. One nearby shawarma place that I discovered right around the time I was writing about shawarma last year, but not soon enough to make it into my shawarma post, is the oddly spelled Shawerma House in Worth, IL. They are located near a few of the bars I threw darts at, when going to bars and throwing darts was still an option. Their chicken shawarma is quite good, dressed only with pickles and a mild Toum sauce before being tightly wrapped in shrak bread and griddled until crisp and well-sealed.

We also discovered that, since our last visit, they have begun to Americanize their menu a bit, and they now offer an absolutely brilliant dish called shawarma cheese fries. What are shawarma cheese fries, you may ask? They are crisp French fries topped with chopped up chunks of chicken shawarma, cueese sauce, and black olives. Indulgent and perfect.

We also ordered a kind of “build-it-yourself” wrap common to Chinese-American menus, mu shu pork. Mu shu pork consists of thin strips of pork, stir fried with a somewhat variant collection of vegetables–mushrooms, cabbage, carrots, scallions, and others. This stir fry is served with rice pancakes for wrapping a small tub of hoisin sauce for dressing them.

I’ve seen mu shu served with tortillas in the past, but prefer these thin, stretchy but delicate pancakes, as served by our local favorite, En Lai Chinese Restaurant at 147th and Cicero in Midlothian. The one issue with these pancakes is that they are so delicate that they are easy to overwhelm with the juicy stir-fry, and care must be taken in constructing one’s wrap.

I even tried a more standard American-style wrap from Franklin Tap in downtown Chicago, just around the corner from my office. Their California Club wrap consists of grilled chicken, lettuce, tomato, bacon, avocado, and ranch dressing wrapped in a flour tortilla and served with a choice of side.

One of those side choices, for a slight upcharge, was loaded tots. If the wrap hadn’t been good–and it was decent, though I’m not a fan of Ranch dressing–the loaded tots, with cheese sauce, bacon, scallions, and sour cream, would have redeemed the meal.

Speaking of tots, one of the places I’d planned to visit this month, Conrad’s Grill in Wicker Park, features a selection of wraps that are stuffed with tater tots, in addition to the various other fillings. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to trying Conrad’s, but I was strangely fascinated by the concept, and imagined that it would be a solid hangover food.

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But our world has gotten strange in the past few weeks. The signs were there beforehand–we had long been planning a vacation to Vietnam, in fact I should have been on a plane flying back from there as I’m writing this, but Vietnam was closing down its markets, and discouraging travel, and quarantining visitors who’d traveled to locations where there had recently been coronavirus outbreaks. Our flights were canceled, and though we tried to keep hope alive we had to concede that the once-in-a-lifetime trip we’d been planning for a year wasn’t going to happen. Then Mindy’s cousin Katy and her husband Daniel, who had been “vagabonding” around Europe, had to flee Italy and then Spain ahead of those countries shutting down.

Turns out Vietnam was ahead of the curve. Here in Illinois, all restaurants and bars were ordered to close for dine-in service, and could only offer curbside takeaway. Then a more general stay-at-home order went out, and we settled into a new normal. We work from home, and only leave the house for essential trips. The Chicago Loop is a ghost town. Though it’s only been a couple of weeks, when I was putting the photos for this piece together, I genuinely felt nostalgic for a time when I could go to a restaurant and sit down and order something.

This will pass, sooner or later–probably later than many people think–and a life outside the home will once again be a reasonable expectation. We have it better than many, in that we have jobs capable of working remotely, and there’s no indication currently that that will change any time soon. And it’s important for the public health to stop the spread of this virus. And if I’m being completely honest I’m not terribly disappointed that I won’t be able to try the wraps from Conrad’s.

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But I did, despite the fact that I’d eaten a fairly excessive number of wraps already this month, want to try at least one more. Something to make at home. Something interesting, an outlier, something I wouldn’t be able to get around here anyway. I thought about trips we’d taken in the past, and trips we planned for the future. I played with ideas–something Thai? Something Vietnamese, to make up for the trip we weren’t taking? No, that would just make us sad.

Then I remembered the trip we took to New Jersey and New York last year, and the Trini doubles, bake, and roti we’d had at A&A in Brooklyn.

In Trinidad and Tobago, like much of the Caribbean, there is a vibrant mix of cultures that have come together–African, European, native, and Indian, with a Creole of street food reflecting that mix. We wrote about Trini Doubles a few years ago, and we tried that while we were at A&A. We’ll be writing about Trini “bakes” some time next year, a fried bread roll stuffed with various seafood such as shark, conch, or saltfish.

The roti we tried at A&A doesn’t have an entry on our List though, and while not photogenic, it was delicious and unique and deserved a deeper dive. This particular flatbread was wrapped around curry goat, which strangely and deliciously enough is cooked and served bone-in. My first bite into the wrap was an eye-opener.

The roti is wrapped around the filling in such a way as to completely enclose it, but not in the tight and portable fashion of a burrito. It is wrapped around it more simply, not to serve as a portable meal, as such, but to serve as an edible container.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzyXsw5tkNM

The “dhalpuri” roti is an interesting and unique flatbread, stuffed as it is with half-cooked, ground, seasoned yellow peas. While in appearance it resembles a slightly thicker-than-usual flour tortilla, when cooking it blows up like a balloon as the surface is browned and the legumes inside finish cooking.

Rather than a repeat of the admittedly delicious curry goat, I elected to use a pair of fillings, as in the video above. First I made curry potato, cooking onions in a spice paste, to which I added some fresh turmeric and amchar masala, then adding water and diced potatoes and simmering until past tender.

For the meat filling, rather than another curry, I decided to make brown stew chicken, a dish common throughout the Caribbean consisting of bone-in chicken marinated in herbs and thickly coated in a caramelized sauce. However, since I wanted to eat this as an actual wrap, I used skinless boneless chicken thighs.

Additionally, I made a tamarind sauce, similar to what I’d made for Trini doubles, but thinner as I used a tamarind concentrate rather than fresh tamarind pulp. I’d also heard in the video above a condiment mentioned that sounded something like “Coachella.” It turns out this is Kuchela, a kind of cooked quick-pickled green mango commonly used in Trini roti.

I cooked the roti on a shallow cast-iron 14″ skillet, so I was able to make them sufficiently large for the kind of wrap I wanted.

I started each wrap with a few spoonsful of curry potato

Then I drizzled tamarind sauce over the curry

Atop this I put a roughly equal amount of the brown stew chicken

Then spread a layer of kuchela over the top.

I used the wrapping method described in the video above, and then cut the wrap open for the money shot.

To be honest, my version of the Trini roti wrap is not much more photogenic than what I had in Brooklyn. But it was delicious, one of the best things I’ve cooked in a long time, as good or better than any of the sandwiches that I’ve called new favorites in the past.

It’s rewarding, this sandwich life. Making this Trini roti required cooking five different recipes, four of which I’d never tried, and two of which were fairly difficult to do correctly–the dhalpuri roti required extreme delicacy in cooking and grinding the yellow peas, in stuffing the dough, and in rolling them out; and the brown stew chicken required absolute full attention and perfect timing in caramelizing the sugar and deglazing the pan with the chicken and its juices. It was a gamble to be able to pull all this off. But I’ve gotten pretty good at what I do in the past few years. My writing may never win any awards. But I’ll be damned if I don’t make some pretty fantastic sandwiches! This wrap was one of them.