Sandwiches of New England: a Supplement

Mindy and I recently traveled to Fall River, Massachusetts to try the Hot Cheese sandwich served at some of the local hot dog stands in town. I wrote about that sandwich in a separate post. While in the area though, we took the opportunity to try some other regional fare, sandwiches and otherwise. Some of them we’ve covered previously on the site. One isn’t scheduled to appear on the site until this coming September. Maybe I jumped the gun a bit trying that one, but it was worth every bite. As I tell the story of that weekend in food, I will be taking my cue from Quentin Tarantino and telling it thematically rather than chronologically. There’s a lot of food in New England, and to paraphrase the wisdom of Grease, some of these items just go together, like shoo-bop sha wadda wadda yippity boom de boom.

More Sandwiches of Fall River

As I mentioned in the Hot Cheese Sandwich post, I happened across a Caçoila in the wild, at J.J.’s Coney Island in Fall River.

Like mine, the Caçoila at J.J.’s Coney Island was a pulled pork sandwich, with tender shredded pork spicy and savory, aromatic with citrus. Unlike mine, theirs was served on a 7 or 8 inch sub roll rather than a round roll, sliced partway through and hinged along one side, which worked better for keeping the pork inside the bun. When I made those sandwiches last year, I was visiting with family in Wisconsin and just used the best bread I could find, which turned out to be Kaiser rolls. As for the pork, theirs had a bit less of the citrus character than mine did, and was notably saltier, but it was terrific. And I’m happy to know that I hit pretty close to the mark when I made it myself.

Of course in addition to the Hot Cheese sandwich and the Caçoila, Fall River is home to the Chow Mein sandwich, featuring crisp Hoo-Mee brand chow mein noodles manufactured at the Oriental Chow Mein Company’s factory in town. On the day we visited Fall River to try these sandwiches, the most well-known purveyor of the dish, Mee Sum restaurant, was closed. However, chow mein sandwiches are available at any number of local Chinese-American restaurants and we were able to get our fix at Sun China Restaurant on Brayton Avenue.

When I made this sandwich back in 2015, I ordered the Hoo-Mee brand chow mein noodles and sauce mix, following the package instructions for the most part (including sprouts, onions, and celery) but embellishing a little by adding shrimp. This sandwich from Sun China also appeared to have been made from the Hoo-Mee noodles, and had a similar sauce enhanced with sprouts and celery and some sort of ground meat, probably beef from the color. If anything, it was slightly better than what I’d made at home–hotter, fresher, proportioned more correctly. But although this sandwich is inexplicably compelling, so was the version I made 9 years ago.

On a similar note, we’d hoped to try the Chop Suey sandwich in Salem, but unfortunately Salem Lowe was still closed for the season. I’ll just have to go back.

Sandwiches That You Will Like

I have said before that one of the inspirations for this exploration of all things sandwich was the 2003 documentary Sandwiches That You Will Like, that Rick Sebak put together for PBS’ Pittsburgh affiliate. As such, the various locations where that documentary was shot and the sandwiches that were featured therein are bucket list material for Mindy and myself. So we found ourselves, on our first night in the Boston area, outside the Iranian Association of Boston where 20 years ago a falafel shop called Sepal once stood. There were other locations, none of which remain open, but this was the original, and where the documentary was filmed. RIP, Sepal. I’m sorry I never got to taste your falafel sandwiches but I’ll bet they were spectacular.

But the other Boston-area spot from the doc is still around. It seems like the type of place that will always be around. Kelly’s sits across Revere Beach Boulevard from the eponymous beach itself, looking out past two shelters housing benches and picnic tables at the Atlantic Ocean beyond. Wind whips the beach’s sand up and over the street where it rests in drifts against the curb, and on a blustery early March day like the one when we visited, you may find a woman standing by the water, inexplicably trying to get a duck to fly away, a duck that, adorably, refuses to leave her arms. Ma’am, I apologize for taking your photo and I hope I didn’t alarm you, but I wish nothing but the best for both you and your bird friend.

Kelly’s has a menu that offers Lobster Rolls and Clam Chowder, pastrami sandwiches and Buffalo chicken wraps, a truly eclectic menu. But what they’re known for, and what the documentary focused on, is their roast beef sandwich, which comes in both a small and a large variety. The sandwich is a variant of the type known in the area as the North Shore roast beef sandwich, and Kelly’s serves it, by default, as a “3-Way,” with white American cheese, mayonnaise, and barbecue sauce.

Given the temperature outdoors and the lack of indoor seating at Kelly’s–as well as the fact that we’d just eaten another, larger, better 3-Way beef sandwich and needed a bit of a rest before tackling this one–we brought it back to the hotel with us before opening it and eating. It survived the trip well, still warm, and the beef was good, rare, sliced thin and piled high as it should be. But as I mentioned, we’d just had a much better version, which I will introduce a bit later.

Boston

This is my friend Arafat. (Arafat is the handsome fellow on the left. I’m the hairy guy). Arafat and I first got to know one another on Something Awful and a spin-off site nearly 20 years ago, and were friends on LiveJournal for a while as well, before losing touch as the internet transitioned away from forums and toward social media. We reconnected a few years ago here on Facebook and this trip to Boston was the first time we ever got to meet in person.

Arafat provided me with plenty of good recommendations for spots to visit while we were in town but was a good sport and let Mindy and I drag him and his friend to Belle Isle Seafood instead, because I once saw Anthony Bourdain eat there. I had another Anthony Bourdain related spot–Rondo’s Subs for a steak hoagie–on my short list of places to try but didn’t get there this trip. Next time!

At Belle Isle, Arafat, his friend Jonathan, and Mindy all ordered fried combo plates, giant piles of breaded shrimp and clams and oysters and haddock and scallops with French fries and onion rings and petite little plastic tubs of coleslaw and cocktail sauce. Mindy also ordered a bowl of clam chowder–because that is also a thing one must eat while visiting New England. I was the odd man out and ordered a lobster roll instead.

The Belle Isle lobster roll is closer to the Maine style of lobster roll, served in a split-top style hot dog bun and consisting of a wisp of lettuce covered in what looked like 2 pounds of cool lobster claw meat tossed lightly with mayonnaise. This little sandwich cost about twice what each of the giant plates of fried fish did–and I was completely satisfied with that. One day I’d like to try the Connecticut style of lobster roll as well, with warm lobster meat doused in butter, but I suppose I’d better go to Connecticut for that.

After this massive meal, we stopped by an ice cream shop in Cambridge called Toscanini’s, where Arafat introduced me to the proprietor Gus Rancatore. We spent the next hour or so chatting, and then Gus gave us a tour of the facilities–their deep freeze, coolers, test kitchen–and told us about some of the flavors they were working with. He gave us each a little taste of some kaya–coconut jam like that used in the Kaya Toast we wrote about a few years ago–and took this picture of the 4 of us in the freezer. And we each ordered a little of the ice cream to try as well, despite the massive fried fish lunch we’d just partaken in.

When I go to an ice cream shop, I tend toward being decisive rather than trying a little tasting spoon of every flavor, and I decided immediately that I wanted to try the Earl Grey Tea flavor they were selling. I made the right choice–it was delicious, clean-tasting with a slight tannic bitterness suggestive of tea and the aromatic citrus of bergamot present, but not overwhelming. It was a well-designed ice cream and seemingly in line with the philosophy of flavors that Gus has espoused in our conversations, in that it was an interesting and unexpected flavor without being over-the-top or gratuitous. I get the feeling that any flavor I tried that day would have been “the right choice.”

The other notable spot near Boston that we tried that weekend was Hot Box at the Bow Market in Somerville. We went there our first night in town, not knowing what to expect and having roughly planned out most of the weekend apart from that first dinner. We did not realize that the Bow Market where Hot Box is located was an open-air two-level shopping center with outdoor seating. Some of the tables were equipped with firepits, but as you can imagine, on a chill early March evening those were all occupied. But we ordered and quickly ate at least a few bites there before retreating to our Lexington hotel, around 25 minutes away.

Hot Box specializes in two things: North Shore Beefs, and South Shore Pizzas. Mindy ordered a spicy pickle pizza, diced dill pickles and hot peppers on a thin, dense, blistered crust with tomato sauce and a mixture of mozzarella and cheddar cheeses. I’m not sure I’m sold when it comes to pickles on pizza–I have a real blind spot around hot cucumbers of any kind. But this was tasty, spicy and sour and savory. I ordered a Super Beef 3-Way and it was a mess, but of the 3 North Shore Beefs I had that weekend, it was the least overstuffed and difficult to eat. It was, however, not great. The beef was sliced more thickly than the others had been and had a little more chew to it as a result. It was almost gristly in parts, so that it didn’t bite through cleanly and dragged saucy bits of beef out of the bread and down my beard and shirt. Tasted great. But it wasn’t until the next morning that I’d taste the true king of North Shore Beefs.

North Shore vs. South Shore

A few weeks before we flew to Boston, I reached out to the @northshorebeefs account on Instagram to ask for recommendations and his reply, though terse, spoke volumes.

There are lots of can’t miss places. My favorite is Zenos. The consensus from the group is Bella’s. They’re top 5 for me. Modern butcher does them once a week and is something that NEEDS to be experienced.

Modern Butcher, in Danvers, MA near Salem, opens at 11am on Saturdays, the one day of the week when they sell their coveted Roast Beef sandwich. We arrived at 10am to find 6 people ahead of us already waiting in line for them to open. By 10:30, the line was around the block. A gregarious gentleman named Doug stepped outside several times, to keep track of how big the crowd was getting and to update us on when the doors would open. Doug seemed to know half the people in line–regulars, I suppose. If I lived nearby I’d probably spend many a Saturday in line there as well.

I told Doug how excited I was to be there, and mentioned that I’d flown from Illinois to be there. “You came to try this?” he asked. Well, yes, this sandwich and a few other things I told him. A short time later, when we stepped inside and were ready to order, the co-owner Warren Means came out and introduced himself, thanked us for being there, and offered to pay for our sandwich since we’d come so far to try it. It was a classy gesture, and I appreciated the hospitality.

The Modern Butcher comes on a well-toasted onion roll, and it is constructed like this: the bottom roll goes down, gets cheese and a handful of beef. Barbecue sauce is poured over the beef. Another handful of beef. Another pour of barbecue sauce. Another handful of beef. Another pour of barbecue sauce. Then a swipe of mayo on the top bun and the sandwich is complete. While one person constructs the sandwiches–and they are making a lot of sandwiches; many of the people in line ahead of us were ordering 4 or 6 sandwiches and taking them to go–Warren slices roast after roast, translucently thin, so that the beef is impossibly tender, and this massive wedge of meat bites through cleanly–if you can fit it in your mouth. Now don’t get me wrong: it is swimming in barbecue sauce and no chin will go unwiped while eating this sandwich. Copious use of napkins is advised. This was, quite simply, the best roast beef sandwich I’ve ever had, and I am already looking for excuses to return. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be able to swing a trip there in September, when the Tribunal will be writing about this sandwich, so I’ll just have to make my own at that time.

Having sampled the delights of the North Shore, later that evening we drove down to the South Shore to try the South Shore Bar Pizza. I don’t remember how I learned about this local specialty. I am pretty sure it was a foodie show on TV, though it could have been an article I read online. Once I told Mindy about it though, it became a fixed point of the weekend that we were going to try it. Mindy picked the place–Poopsie’s in Pembroke, MA–and we showed up on a Saturday evening to find–utter chaos. We stood inside the door and gaped as waitresses rushed around attending to too many tables and a harried bartender slung drinks for both the bar and the dining area. After a few moments of uncertainty, a gentleman at the far end of the bar waved us over and asked “Would you like to sit at the bar? I’m just having a beer while I wait for my pizzas, they’re almost done.”

We sat at the end of the bar with a view into the kitchen, to the stacks of pans, blackened with carbon over decades of use, exactly as I remember them being described in that unknown piece of media where I first learned about them. The bartender, filling glasses for the waitress stand directly to my right, breathlessly told us “You’re looking at over an hour for the pizza,” before I had a chance to ask. I said, “I guess that’ll give us some time to drink a beer while we wait for them,” and he seemed to relax. Before long I had a menu in one hand and a draft of Stella in the other. I ordered a Linguiça pizza featuring slices of Portuguese sausage not too dissimilar from salami or pepperoni, and Mindy ordered a Hawaiian pizza. We sat, and drank, and watched the news, and chatted in spurts with our bartender, who was friendly but constantly in motion. We watched through the door in to the kitchen, where the pizza maker would bring pans down from where they were stacked on shelves above his head, quickly stretch the dough to the edges of the pan, ladle sauce from center to edge in a single practiced swirl, giving the occasional pan a whack on the side to get sauce onto a tricky spot, then take a handful of shredded cheese from a plastic tub on the counter, a bigger handful than you might think belonged on such a small pizza, and spread it around to the edges as well. It was an entertaining evening, and the 75 minutes or so between ordering our pizzas and receiving them went by quickly.

The bar pizza’s crust was dense, chewy, charred in places, the sauce and cheese at the outer edges also verging toward dark brown in spots. The cheese definitely appeared to have some white cheddar mixed in, it neither melted nor tasted like straight mozzarella. Not one person gave Mindy a hard time about ordering a Hawaiian pizza, and I could see why–it was a great pizza, at least as good as the Linguiça pizza I ordered, savory with little hits of sweet, tart, juicy pineapple, not in large chunks nor in shreds but in discrete small pieces, perfect for pizza. I was happy to have tried the Linguiça as well. That garlicky paprika-forward sausage did not curl itself up into crisp little cups of fat the way pepperoni does; rather it rendered its fat evenly and lay flat on the pizza like pieces of bologna, soft rather than hard, but strong flavored like a salami. Both pizzas were delicious

Heading Home

On our last day in the area, with a late flight back to Illinois and having exhausted much of our sightseeing desires, we decided to drive to Woonsocket, Rhode Island to try the Dynamite sandwich that I wrote about in 2015, an article that is still one of the most viewed on the site, since it’s the top result in Google searches for dynamite sandwich. It’s also the most-commented post on the site–the folks of Woonsocket love their Dynamite sandwiches and are naturally protective of them, and though they’ve been very nice in general, they have made plenty of suggestions on how I should improve my recipe and my article. The suggestions for improving the recipe tend to be things like: add more celery, make it spicier. The suggestions to improve my article universally demand that I stop comparing Dynamites to Sloppy Joes.

And now, having tried a Dynamite in Woonsocket (though not at a church potluck or a backyard barbecue, more’s the pity), I agree with them. This is not very much like a Sloppy Joe at all, or at least only superficially, in the sense that it contains loose ground beef and a tomato-based sauce. I won’t change the name of that earlier article but I will add some text to that effect at the top of the article within a few days.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Woonsocket seemed like a very cute town–every town we drove through in New England was absolutely picturesque to be fair–and the spot where we stopped to try the Dynamite, New York Lunch, was absolutely adorable, family-run and full of friendly folks, with a dining room overrun by decades of organically accumulated kitsch, tin signs, framed posters, cigarette and car advertisements from a bygone era, a framed photo of George Reeves as Superman, street signs, the Beatles, the Blues Brothers, layer on layer of our American civilization preserved in pop-culture palimpsest. It was beautiful.

I ordered the Dynamite, of course; Mindy asked for an apple crisp. Additionally, I requested one of the “New York System” style hot wieners served in Rhode Island, a hot dog covered in mustard and meat sauce, onion and celery salt.

The apple crisp was a delight that could grace the table at any diner anywhere in this country. The wiener was less successful, owing to a piece of stale bun made every bite questionable. But the Dynamite was terrific, and much different from a Sloppy Joe for reasons that go beyond the form factor. It is less saucy than a sloppy joe–the sauce is reduced to just a bit of glazing that clings to the meat and peppers. Those peppers, green and red, are far more prominent than they would be in a sloppy joe, cut into large chunks rather than diced fine. And while this particular version was not very spicy–the gentleman who brought these plates to our table, the owner/cook’s son I believe, told us that they keep it on the milder side because they have a largely elderly clientele, but offered me a shaker of red pepper flakes to perk mine up if I wanted–in general Dynamite sauce will lean into the bell pepper and chili pepper savory spice where a Sloppy Joe will stay on the sweeter, milder, saucier side.

It’s easy to see why someone like myself, on the outside looking in, would compare the two. But it’s also understandable how the folks of Woonsocket would love this local delicacy, consider it a piece of their home, and try to protect it from such perceived insults. If I were to redo my recipe today, I would go harder on the peppers, cut them in bigger chunks, add celery, use more red pepper flakes, and reduce the sauce to the point where the mixture was almost dry. In fact, I may make Dynamites some time in the next few months and try to tweak that recipe.

All good things must come to an end, and all too soon we found ourselves back at Logan waiting for our flight back to Midway. Since we arrived early, we had plenty of time to walk from Terminal B, from which our flight would be departing, waaaaay over to Terminal E, where Italian deli Monica’s Mercato had an outpost, to try the sandwich Arafat had told us was the best Italian sub in Boston. We also took the opportunity to get into a sandwich we’d picked up earlier in the day at a gas station deli, the Moon sandwich from Amato’s. Monica’s Italian Sub consists of prosciutto, mortadella, salami, and provolone on a crusty 10″ roll with lettuce, tomato, onion, balsamic glaze and oil, hot peppers, and pickles. The light in the airport setting wasn’t doing it any favors, but it really was a terrific sandwich, thanks for the recommendation Arafat! Though I imagine that the version they sell at Monica’s in North End would be more carefully assembled, I have no complaints about this sandwich, except that I made the mistake of biting into it before I tried the Moon sandwich. The Amato’s delis scattered in a few gas stations across the south of Massachusetts are based out of Portland, Maine, and while they make fresh sandwiches and calzones to order, the Moon is not one of those but rather a pre-made, plastic-wrapped sandwich available to grab-and-go from the cooler section of the gas station. It is essentially a kind of Italian sub in a bulkie roll, sort of a local style of Kaiser roll, and according to one commenter on this page they were introduced in 1969, presumably to celebrate the moon landing. Maybe this Moon sandwich would have been tastier if it didn’t have to compete with Monica’s Italian but as it was, the Moon stood no chance.

And so here we are, back in Illinois, with fond memories of good times in New England, I do hope to return one day, to try that steak hoagie at Rondo’s Subs, and to finally get a chop suey sandwich from Salem Lowe, and hopefully to wait in line again for that amazing beef sandwich at Modern Butcher in Danvers. Next time I hope they’ll let me pay for it!