Hot roast beef dripping with its own juices; a pile of Italian meat drenched in dressings and vegetables; the humble coupling of peanut butter and jelly. Slap any of these things between two pieces of bread and you’ve got yourself a sandwich.
Popular legend holds that the sandwich gets its name from John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich, who liked to have meat brought to him between slices of bread so that he could have a meal without putting down his playing cards.
Los Angeles has more than its fair share of sandwich restaurants, all very different. So what makes a good sandwich?
According to history doctoral student Caroline Luce, it’s what she calls a “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” phenomenon.
“You get a bite of what could be a whole plate of food in a convenient little package,” Luce said.
She studies Jewish food culture in Los Angeles from 1920 to 1950, which she calls a formative period in American eating.
“I think that the sandwich sort of emerges as this perfect lunch: It’s quick, it’s cheap, you don’t have to serve it,” Luce said. “You can just give somebody a sandwich.”
At Philippe The Original at 1001 N. Alameda St. downtown, it’s all about tradition. The restaurant is kept very much the same as it looked when it was founded in 1908. Lines form in front of the long, stainless steel counters, busboys in paper hats mill about, and the women making the sandwiches wear dresses straight out of “I Love Lucy.”
“Our sandwich and our food here are not fancy,” said manager Mark Massengill. “It’s very simple, but it’s very high-quality, and it’s very traditional. We haven’t changed it for about a hundred years. People, I think, come back here because they like the fact that we haven’t changed things too much. They know what they’re getting.”
What most of them are getting is the French Dipped Sandwich, which Philippe The Original is famous for. As the story goes, in 1918, chef Philippe Mathieu accidentally dropped a French roll into some beef pan roastings that had just come out of the oven, but a customer said he would take it anyway. He liked it so much that he came back the next day with several friends, and the sandwich soon became the restaurant’s claim to fame.
The recipe has not changed in almost 100 years. There are only three ingredients: a 6-inch French roll, 4 ounces of bottom round beef roasted on the premises (the sandwich can also be made with pork, lamb, turkey or tuna) and either a single or double dipping of au jus, a salty, juicy sauce made fresh from the beef pan drippings.
“It’s so simple, there’s not a lot of fancy changes that can be made, you know, “˜hold this’ or “˜add extra that,'” Massengill said. “Because the sandwich is really a simple food, all the ingredients that go into it have to be high quality.”
Massengill estimates that the restaurant serves 2,000-3,000 French Dips a day, two-thirds of which are the original beef. The double-dip, which Massengill recommends for the authentic French Dip experience, turns the absorbent, crackling French roll into a salty sponge full of beef flavor. It’s beef, seasoned with more beef, on beef-flavored bread.
That simplicity has driven Philippe for the past century, and there are no plans to change the recipe any time soon.
“I think people are pretty aware of the history here,” Massengill said. “I think that’s a good part of the reason why they come back here ““ the history.”
Across town at Bay Cities Italian Deli and Bakery in Santa Monica, manager Hector Padilla says a good sandwich is all about one thing.
“The bread. The bread is the No. 1 ingredient,” Padilla said.
Bay Cities, at 1517 Lincoln Blvd., is famous for its Godmother sandwich, made from five Italian meats: capicola, mortadella, Genoa salami, prosciutto and boiled ham. It was first concocted in 1952 by Antonio DiTomasi, who whipped up the sandwich from his favorite meats. He gave it the name “Godmother” because a godmother takes care of the family.
“It’s a nourishing sandwich,” Padilla said.
This sandwich nourishes an estimated 600-800 customers a day.
The Italian bread is baked on site in a process that takes 24 hours. The steam in the oven creates blisters on the crust, giving each loaf a crunchy outside and a soft middle. Then to make the Godmother, the combination of meats is added, plus “The Works,” which are lettuce, tomato, onions, pickles, Italian dressing, mayo, mustard and hot or mild peppers.
“You got the veggies, you got a little bit of oil for the joints and you got the meat for the protein,” Padilla said. “Besides, we got to keep the cardiologists in business.”
The meats by themselves would make for a hefty sandwich, and adding the works turns it into a serious meal. All the Italian flavors meld together into a tangy, crunchy, chewy, messy sandwich. That messiness is what first-year world arts and cultures student Sebastian Milla relishes about the Godmother.
“I think it’s just that it feels devoid of protocol,” Milla said. “That guy … that made mine, he was like, “˜I threw a little extra on there, I threw a little something.’ It’s kind of like not in the box.”
There is no definitive answer as to what makes a good sandwich: the simplicity, fresh ingredients, the bread, the lack of protocol. But what these sandwiches have in common is the mixture of Old World cuisine with American casual food traditions to create something greater than the sum of their parts. To Luce, that’s what makes these sandwiches distinctly American and such an essential part of L.A. food culture.
“Almost everything that we think of as being this sort of American thing is, in a lot of ways, kind of reinvented traditions from elsewhere,” Luce said.
“I think there’s something to be said for Los Angeles’ food as being this kind of magical combination of layers. In that way, much like California culture in general, it becomes this sort of fantastic composite and hybrid of reinvented things.”