Taking a Whack at New York’s Chopped Cheese

It was May 2017. Mindy and I traveled to New York City, mostly to celebrate our 20th anniversary, in part to get bagels and lox at some of Manhattan’s more storied establishments, and low-key to try as many vital, unavailable-elsewhere sandwiches as we could identify. We tried the Dennis from Parisi Bakery, which Mindy had read in a somewhat effusive Google review was the world’s greatest sandwich. (Did that review lie? I haven’t eaten every sandwich in the world, but I’d say the Dennis is a solid contender.) We stopped by the (now closed) No. 7 Subs right by our hotel in Central Park South to try some of the sandwiches I’d recently read about in chef Tyler Kord’s A Super Upsetting Cookbook About Sandwiches.

And one afternoon we took a 6 train uptown to 110th Street, walked east a few blocks past the Tito Puente mural

and ordered a chopped cheese sandwich at the Harlem deli that many locals still just call Hajji’s.

Hajji’s was and is commonly considered the point of origin of this sandwich, where it was supposedly invented by a grillman sometime during the 1990s. They’d seen a spike in their business following the national interest in the sandwich the year previous, but that seemed to have died down somewhat when we visited in 2017. The store was not busy while we were there, and we felt quite welcome as we ordered a chopped cheese hero to split. In fact, when we asked if there was any way we could sit in the store to eat, the cashier very thoughtfully brought some plastic milk crates out from behind the counter. We perched on the milk crates, using an ice cream cooler as our table, and dug in.

The sandwich was outstanding. Ground beef, highly seasoned, quickly cooked on a griddle, chopped into small mince along with onions, coated in melted American cheese, topped with tomatoes and lettuce and dressed with mayonnaise and ketchup, in a crisp, warm, pressed hero roll.

We had a lot of good sandwiches on that trip, but something about that Chopped Cheese sandwich had captured our imagination. It had some kind of alchemical magic about it, a combination of simple ingredients that was greater than the sum of its parts. We tried for months to make our own version at home. We got pretty close. But I think part of the magic of the sandwich is the locality of it, the immediacy of it. To be able to walk into a corner store, order a sandwich, and just a couple minutes and a couple bucks later walk out with a chopped cheese–that’s a magic that isn’t available outside certain parts of New York. Harlem. The Bronx. Queens. Parts of Brooklyn maybe. The non-white areas of New York, in large part.

Just the year before we went, there had been a bit of a kerfuffle, as the white foodie world had “discovered” the sandwich. The website Insider posted a breathlessly tone-deaf video about it, claiming that “most New Yorkers don’t know about” the sandwich, and compared it alternately to the Philly Cheesesteak and a “cheeseburger, only on a sub roll.”

The backlash was swift and brutal. I did not catch the original video, but the backlash made the sandwich’s profile go national. Not long after, many other prominent sites had their own pieces on the chopped cheese. Months before, foodie site First We Feast had published a thoughtful story and video on the sandwich. I don’t remember when I first learned about it, but it was at some point during that time.

For years, though, both before and after the sandwich blew up in 2016, it had been lauded, championed, even evangelized by a population that, I’ll be honest, I did not then and mostly still don’t have much knowledge of or insight into: the New York hip hop scene.

In 2008, Dipset founder Cam’ron filmed a music video in Hajji’s deli, mostly near the back where the grillman cooks these sandwiches on a stainless steel griddle. In 2014, rapper Audubon recorded a song called “Chopped Cheese,” and made a video that featured some footage of the sandwich’s preparation. Since then literally dozens more rappers have followed suit with their own songs featuring the chopped cheese sandwich.

I’ve embedded probably my two favorite examples here, but I have made a playlist on Youtube with many more, if that sounds like a rabbithole you’d like to follow to its end. There are several more worth hearing.

So clearly the chopped cheese is a sandwich that fascinates me. I have made a few of them this month, and taken the pictures as is expected of me. I baked my own hero rolls, bought a nice stainless steel griddle to fit over my propane grill and made plenty of chopped cheese sandwiches over the course of a week or so.

I even made the smaller Kaiser roll variant as well, that you can usually get for a buck or so less than the hero.

And this time I went above and beyond–or possibly below and beyond the pale–and made a video demonstrating making a chopped cheese sandwich, which you can find at the top of this post, or on Youtube. I don’t have the practiced technique that the grillmen who’ve spent years or even decades making this sandwich have acquired. I understand as well that there is more variation to the sandwich than I’m presenting here–variation in sauce, in seasoning, additions of pickles or peppers that one deli or another might do. I’ve read that the farther into Queens one gets, the higher the likelihood that a deli will have put its own unique touches on the sandwich. I’d like to get back there and try them all. This one though gets pretty close to what I had at Hajji’s just a few years ago.

Hopefully my efforts aren’t completely wasted, and you find this video interesting, entertaining, or possibly just amusing. Please feel free to leave me a (preferably constructive) comment either here or over at Youtube. Happy eating, friends!