Sandwich of the Week is For The Win’s weekly celebration of great sandwiches. If you have a sandwich you’d like to recommend, please direct it to the author’s Facebook page.
The internet makes it really easy to be a know-it-all. Since we can now find the bulk of human knowledge with a quick Google search and a few clicks, it is always tempting to pretend we were long familiar with whatever new thing people are trying to tell us about. I am convinced that some 50% of the devastation expressed over the deaths of somewhat obscure celebrities comes from people who were only vaguely aware of that person’s existence before finding out he or she had died. So it goes.
That’s all a long-winded way of excusing myself for an item of professional embarrassment. I have lived in or around New York City for most of my life and frequently visited bodegas throughout, and I have regularly researched and written about area sandwiches in five of the last seven years, but until a wonderfully reported First We Feast post this January, I had never heard of a chopped-cheese sandwich.
It would be easy for me to save face by insisting I have been eating them since middle school, and no one would be able to call my bluff. But I feel confident that I know a ton about regional specialty sandwiches and I have the waistline to prove it, and in truth, I find it far more interesting to recognize that I might wholly whiff on a delicious staple available practically under my nose. This world remains full of mystery, and this city brims with undiscovered delicacies. It’s fantastic.
First We Feast identifies the chopped cheese as a favorite of area rappers, and so I consider it a great and rare failure of Big Pun, Fat Joe and the entire Terror Squad that they didn’t manage to hip me to this sooner. Also, though I aim to focus more on the taste of the sandwich than its origins, the site suggests it could represent a mash-up of a traditional Yemeni dish with popular American ingredients. So many of our greatest food innovations come from cross-cultural synergy, enough that the frequent and largely impossible search for “authenticity” in our meals seems misguided at best.
The sandwich
A chopped-cheese hero from Blue Sky Deli and Grocery on 110th St. and 1st Ave. in Manhattan. The aforementioned First We Feast article notes this particular bodega as the potential birthplace of the chopped-cheese, and it so happens it’s only about a five-minute bike ride from my apartment. I lived within spitting distance of this sandwich for several years before knowing it existed. Sad.
The construction
Ground beef and American cheese, all chopped up and spread on a pressed hero roll. I ordered mine with ketchup, mayo, lettuce and tomato.
Important background information
“Bodega” is a Spanish word that serves as short-hand for any small, non-chain corner grocery and convenience store. They vary greatly in size, quality, and inventory, and they are owned and operated by people of varying ethnicities — hardly just Hispanics. Few things thrill me more than entering a bodega I’ve never been to before. Roaming its aisles and taking stock of its stock can give you a feel for both the store itself and the neighborhood around.
At the Blue Sky Deli — commonly called “Hajji’s” in the neighborhood — there are always a couple of regulars hanging out near the grill, chatting with the dude making their sandwiches. On the shelves, rosemary-and-olive-oil potato chips encroach on cassava chips and in the fridges, pre-prepared green smoothies and antioxidant teas make headway against the bodega stalwart Tropical Fantasy — a neon-colored, unspeakably sweet and impossibly inexpensive brand of soda that was a middle-school favorite of mine and just about everyone else. In the few times I have been to Blue Sky Deli, I have not seen a bodega cat or any real evidence of a bodega cat. Many bodegas have cats. It’s a thing.
What it looks like
(USA TODAY Sports)
How it tastes
Awesome. The chopped cheese is a simple thing, and not in any way a subtle one. Every bite comes first and foremost with a hot, gooey and delicious mix of American cheese and ground beef, with the former providing most of the flavor and the latter most of the bulk. It’s got a lot in common with a classic cheesesteak, of course, but also feels like a relative of the grilled-cheese sandwich due both to the prominence of salty, greasy, delightful American cheese flavor and the crunchiness that ensues from pressing the bread.
About that: The apparent popularity of Blue Sky Deli among bodegas, as demonstrated by the regulars perpetually standing around waiting for sandwiches, means the bread has always been fresh in my experiences there. Pressed to a toasty perfection, it makes a perfect edible holster for the mess of meat and cheese within. It adds plenty of crunch without too much bulk.
People judge American cheese, I know, but Sandwich of the Week makes no such judgments. And to be honest, the dudes working at Blue Sky don’t seem likely to judge your order, either. There’s none of the surly nonsense associated with ordering a cheesesteak at Philadelphia’s most celebrated purveyors. Here it’s just, “hey, what do you want on that?” And there’s no indication they won’t pile anything they’ve got on top of there if you request it.
I went with ketchup for sweetness, mayo for some (probably unnecessary) extra creaminess and moisture, and lettuce and tomato because I wanted the crunch of the lettuce and because I instinctively tag most of my deli sandwich orders with “lettuce and tomato.” The thin slices of tomato don’t factor much into the flavor or texture of the sandwich, though the lettuce does bring a little crispiness and extra heft.
It’s rich and greasy, and not something I could imagine craving more than once every couple of weeks. But its availability and my growing familiarity with its delicious particulars likely sounds the death knell for my ever eating at fast-food burger places in the area, especially considering its price point. Here comes that:
What it costs
$4.00! The chopped cheese hero, undressed, costs $3.50, and it’s an extra quarter each for lettuce and tomato. The cashier initially charged me an extra 50 cents for onions, then gave it back when he realized I didn’t get it with onions. I was impressed enough with what I thought was a $4.50 price tag. And it’s a huge sandwich. An incredible bargain.
How it rates
87 out of 100, but way higher if you’re putting more weight in a cost-to-sandwich-excellence ratio. It falls shy of the Hall of Fame for its limited range of flavors, even if those flavors are dope. To put it in baseball terms, as I like to do, this sandwich seems the equivalent of a one-dimensional power hitter who plays lousy defense but thrills crowds with thunderous moonshots. It’s hardly perfect, but it’s a marvelous thing to behold nonetheless.
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