Nic Eats: I Fu Tang Bakery's Salad Sandwich
"At least it wasn’t meat paste, Rebecca."
Hi Friends. Today, I bring you a guest post. One I am hoping is the first in an ongoing series - or maybe it is just a one off, no pressure - in which Nic writes about food and the wonderful experiences it creates. If you like this, please let us know.
Also, you do not have to be married to me to have a guest post published here. Got an idea for something you think fits? You know where to find me (If you don't: you can reply to this email or leave a comment.)
Ok, over to Nic Eats, which Nic recommends you read while listening to this song1, which she says is “Soft and Squishy”, much like the sandwich in question.
“Strange”
It is strange that I have chosen for my first piece of food writing to be about a sandwich. It’s not that I dislike ‘em, it’s just rarely what I’m in the mood for. Bread feels like thankless work for my mouth; a spongy blockade between me and “the thing” aka whatever the filling is. Bread is an unreliable vehicle, requiring moist ingredients and then quickly succumbing to dampness and inevitable structural collapse. And honestly, bread is just meh. Of all the carbs, it’s down at the bottom of the list for me.
A sandwich doesn’t feel like a meal – maybe that’s a holdover from my childhood of seeing my brother augment every evening meal (more or less) with four slices of buttered white bread, like a +4 starch on what was already a generously portioned full dinner. A sandwich, in short, never satisfies.
As a child with food issues, bread was a constant, mostly in the form of sandwiches. We were white people from the north of England with two working parents; we ate a shitload of sandwiches. I would go through phases of liking only certain fillings; meat paste from a jar (good God), a kind of jellied luncheon meat from Preston market that resembled head cheese (WTF), and cheese & onion.
If you’ve not had a cheese and onion sandwich, do yourself a favor. Finely shred cheese (medium cheddar, extra points if you can find Lancashire cheese), very finely chop some raw onion, mix those together with a little salad cream (apologies for the trip you have to make to the specialty British or Irish food store), not enough to make it a spread but enough to form rugged clumps2, apply fairly thickly to thin slices of squidgy white buttered bread, and enjoy. The onions add zip and crunch, the salad cream is vinegary and bright, and the whole thing just rocks.
I took these on a hike once and the look on the face of my American compatriot when I told her what lay within was pure horror; I may as well have been eating the raw onion whole. She took one bite and said, quite kindly, “not for me”. At least it wasn’t meat paste, Rebecca.
I would like to take a moment to talk about hot dogs. I don’t care if they’re a sandwich or not (in the same way I don’t care if Die Hard is a Christmas movie or not. It’s a dull and pointless conversation), but I do love them.
On a recent trip to Chicago I tried a depression dog that restored my faith in Chicago food. I also had an Italian beef sandwich that I really enjoyed, but perhaps wet beef sandwiches are a tale for another time. Anyway, depression dog, great stuff. Squashy sponge bread, steamed dog, soft French fries – for a person who does not enjoy any of the frippery added to a classic Chicago dog, it was a breath of fresh (salty, starchy, staunch) air. Eaten standing up, gazing out onto a parking lot, paired with a dazzlingly orange house-made beverage, it was satisfying and redeeming.
Another hot dog iconoclast is Joe Jost’s in Long Beach. A dreamy, unfussy dive bar with jars of pickled eggs on the counter, they serve a confusing wiener conundrum: a split Polish paired with a pickle spear and a slice of Swiss, sandwiched between two slices of rye bread. Add salami if you dare. The Joe’s Special ain’t it for me.
I’m really a lover of one hot dog in particular, and it’s the LA street dog. It has to be a quarter pound beef, wrapped in thin-cut bacon and sizzled on a cutting-board-sized flat top somewhere on the streets of Los Angeles. The real ones will let you select your own dog; choose from a range of crisp finishes. There’s something so wonderful about leathery-jerky-like charred bacon giving way to the unbelievably salty juiciness of a thick dog, topped with (for me) ketchup, mayo, and a generous cluster of coarsely-chopped and grilled peppers and onions. I have eaten these at night outside of the Staples Center; I have eaten them at 945am outside the courthouse downtown on my way to work. I love them unabashedly. I love the vendors – one once asked if I needed a Coke to go with my dog, and when I declined, he reached underneath his grill to produce a can of Modelo wrapped in a split-open Coke can. This man is a genius and an entrepreneur3, and his dog was fantastic.
I am the fortunate coworker of a Taiwanese mom who at some point decided I am another of her children, and who subsequently feeds me all kinds of great food (there are other wonderful benefits to our friendship but I am just talking about food right now). She and her husband drive downtown from the San Gabriel Valley every day, often with a home cooked meal that they share with me.
On days with doctor’s appointments or other commitments, they’ll bring something in they grabbed on the way in. In the past it has been Yoshinoya, Lee’s Sandwiches, bento boxes from 99 Ranch Market or JJ Bakery, but lately it has been the salad sandwich from I Fu Tang Bakery, a Taiwanese bakery in San Gabriel. I’ve never been in person but the photos on Yelp paint a comforting, familiar picture: old-school charm wrought from hand-written signs in layers years deep, great prices, good selection and a sense of SGV history.
I also haven’t tried any of their other offerings besides the salad sandwich, but I eat what I am given, in this case, a free sandwich.
The comically soft, uniform brioche-esque roll has yielded to a knife in the tummy, carving a valley through which flows a dense, cloudy glacier of potato salad. Neither perfectly smooth nor notably chunky, the salad oozes unctuously, harboring clots of potato that escaped the pureeing process, along with prettifying flecks of carrot that add neither flavor nor texture, but are fun nonetheless. The dressing is – oh I don’t know. Mayonnaise plus? I’d be challenged to harbor a guess, based on my limited sandwich knowledge. It tastes cool and white, somehow, like cupcake frosting made from a ghost. It’s kind of sweet, but not overly, and only adds another layer of cloy to the endless white space of this filling.
This sandwich is like eating an easy chair, or gnawing at a Nicholas Sparks novel. Comforting, but insurmountable. The only break from the one-note beige symphony is the crowning of sliced hard-boiled eggs, adding to both the whiteness and the difficulty of eating. My mouth is not tall enough for this sandwich; I have to chew on it from the sides, like a goat eating a hedgerow. This does lead to imbalanced bites (another criticism I have of sandwiches in general); one bite is all bread, the next I’m lapping up potato salad filling as if from an ice cream cone, with an eye ever on the precarious egg slices. Often, I’ll just eat the egg slices first, like an appetizer, but the best bites of this sandwich incorporate all the elements (of course, because this sandwich was created by a person who cares about sandwiches), so it does a disservice to take the easy way out. Best to struggle through, eyes agape and jaw unhinging, to ensure that perhaps a third of your bites are really, pretty great4.
The original song choice, softer and squisher still, was The Spiral In Your Stair by Matt Marque but we could not find it streaming anywhere. So play that as well, if you have access to it.
CW Note: The Joe’s Special also has mustard on the bread. The Joe’s special ROCKS but I take mine without pickle, because pickles are vinegary hell and I’m trying to get to hotdog heaven.
CW Note: I witnessed this episode. It was right outside of Tom’s Watch Bar at LA Live and I am filled with regrets that I did not get this vendors name and a selfie with him so I know how to find him next time, when I do want an illicit Modelo with my hot dog.
CW Note: I have also eaten this sandwich, because I was lucky, they had leftovers and Nic brought one home for me. It’s so weird but so good. Eggs, Potato Salad, Bread - what’s not to love.