Anglojew
04-14-2015, 11:53 PM
A normal sandwich was what I had in mind one day in January. Normal is not what Meat Hook Sandwich does, though, so I ended up eating something that I would call the greatest cheeseburger I’ve ever tasted if not for the inconvenient fact that it wasn’t a cheeseburger. What I ate was a chopped cheese sandwich, also known — in the very small patch of the United States where it is known at all — as chop cheese.
This sandwich rarely strays from its natural habitat, the bodegas of Harlem and the Bronx. Filled with griddled ground beef in a cloak of melted American cheese, it is a distant relative of the Philadelphia cheesesteak and of the tavern sandwich, an Iowa standby that also goes by the irresistible name “loose meat.” In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Meat Hook Sandwich stirs in some pickle relish and piles the meat-cheese-relish amalgam onto a sesame-seed semolina roll. The relish makes every bite spicy and sweet, while the cheese makes the meat, already potent and rich, extra hot and slick. The architecture of the chopped cheese avoids a common if generally overlooked flaw of many cheeseburgers: the tendency of the cheese to drift upward from the patty and incorporate itself into the upper bun.
http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/04/15/dining/15REST2/15REST2-articleLarge.jpg
Discovering this rearranged cheeseburger at the sandwich shop should not have been a shock. The place opened last year as a satellite of the Meat Hook, a butcher store a few blocks away whose bacon-cheeseburger sausage has made numerous and rewarding (for me) trips from the display case to my grill. Behind the counter, brawny women and men are always breaking down entire hogs and sides of beef from livestock raised on virtuous nearby farms. The economics of whole-animal butchery demand ingenuity in selling off the less-popular cuts and scraps. House-made cold cuts were an obvious sideline. As mortadella, ham and pâté amassed, the omens began to gesture toward sandwiches.
The Meat Hook’s restaurant, on Lorimer Street, does not look expensively decorated; the neon sign spelling “sandwich” in big white block capitals was a hand-me-down from another sandwich business. This hangs on one of two brick walls painted white. Fourteen backless metal stools surround exactly three tables. Sandwiches are ordered at a counter and delivered to the table in red plastic baskets. This is the extent of what you would call “service,” except on Wednesday nights, when $25 buys a Meat Hook steak, an accompaniment (sometimes a salad) and as many bottles of cheap beer as you can drink without calling attention to yourself. The beers, Miller High Life or Pacifico, are carried to the dining room by a butcher moonlighting as a cook doubling as a waiter.
The sandwich concern was founded by three pillars of the butcher shop: Brent Young, a Pittsburgh native with a lifelong hoagie fixation; Ben Turley, a rehabilitated restaurant cook; and Tom Mylan, who recently wriggled off the Meat Hook. They put a veteran Brooklyn chef named Gil Calderon in charge of the kitchen. Try to picture the lunch a hungry young butcher would dream about after spending the morning hunched over a large animal with a hacksaw, and you have a good idea what you are in for. There are no elegant tricorner panini, and nothing you can eat with one hand while holding a pinot grigio in the other. The cooks listen to their lizard brains.
Simultaneously, a higher sandwich intelligence is at work, one that understands the crucial role of contrast and the life-giving spark of condiments. Or, as Mr. Turley and Mr. Calderon recently put it, “Don’t think of your sandwich as a Beyoncé, think of it as a Destiny’s Child.” The kitchen knows that even great roast beef, which the Meat Hook’s is, needs backup. It needs a tangy, salty slice of Cheddar and horseradish sauce. Shredded lettuce for its juicy crispness and then, for a savory crackle, papery wheels of fried red onions. Finally, the bootylicious ingredient: a scattering of potato that seems to have been scraped off the bottom of a pan of hash browns.
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/dining/restaurant-review-meat-hook-sandwich-in-williamsburg-brooklyn.html?rref=dining&module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=Food&action=click®ion=FixedRight&pgtype=Multimedia
This sandwich rarely strays from its natural habitat, the bodegas of Harlem and the Bronx. Filled with griddled ground beef in a cloak of melted American cheese, it is a distant relative of the Philadelphia cheesesteak and of the tavern sandwich, an Iowa standby that also goes by the irresistible name “loose meat.” In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Meat Hook Sandwich stirs in some pickle relish and piles the meat-cheese-relish amalgam onto a sesame-seed semolina roll. The relish makes every bite spicy and sweet, while the cheese makes the meat, already potent and rich, extra hot and slick. The architecture of the chopped cheese avoids a common if generally overlooked flaw of many cheeseburgers: the tendency of the cheese to drift upward from the patty and incorporate itself into the upper bun.
http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/04/15/dining/15REST2/15REST2-articleLarge.jpg
Discovering this rearranged cheeseburger at the sandwich shop should not have been a shock. The place opened last year as a satellite of the Meat Hook, a butcher store a few blocks away whose bacon-cheeseburger sausage has made numerous and rewarding (for me) trips from the display case to my grill. Behind the counter, brawny women and men are always breaking down entire hogs and sides of beef from livestock raised on virtuous nearby farms. The economics of whole-animal butchery demand ingenuity in selling off the less-popular cuts and scraps. House-made cold cuts were an obvious sideline. As mortadella, ham and pâté amassed, the omens began to gesture toward sandwiches.
The Meat Hook’s restaurant, on Lorimer Street, does not look expensively decorated; the neon sign spelling “sandwich” in big white block capitals was a hand-me-down from another sandwich business. This hangs on one of two brick walls painted white. Fourteen backless metal stools surround exactly three tables. Sandwiches are ordered at a counter and delivered to the table in red plastic baskets. This is the extent of what you would call “service,” except on Wednesday nights, when $25 buys a Meat Hook steak, an accompaniment (sometimes a salad) and as many bottles of cheap beer as you can drink without calling attention to yourself. The beers, Miller High Life or Pacifico, are carried to the dining room by a butcher moonlighting as a cook doubling as a waiter.
The sandwich concern was founded by three pillars of the butcher shop: Brent Young, a Pittsburgh native with a lifelong hoagie fixation; Ben Turley, a rehabilitated restaurant cook; and Tom Mylan, who recently wriggled off the Meat Hook. They put a veteran Brooklyn chef named Gil Calderon in charge of the kitchen. Try to picture the lunch a hungry young butcher would dream about after spending the morning hunched over a large animal with a hacksaw, and you have a good idea what you are in for. There are no elegant tricorner panini, and nothing you can eat with one hand while holding a pinot grigio in the other. The cooks listen to their lizard brains.
Simultaneously, a higher sandwich intelligence is at work, one that understands the crucial role of contrast and the life-giving spark of condiments. Or, as Mr. Turley and Mr. Calderon recently put it, “Don’t think of your sandwich as a Beyoncé, think of it as a Destiny’s Child.” The kitchen knows that even great roast beef, which the Meat Hook’s is, needs backup. It needs a tangy, salty slice of Cheddar and horseradish sauce. Shredded lettuce for its juicy crispness and then, for a savory crackle, papery wheels of fried red onions. Finally, the bootylicious ingredient: a scattering of potato that seems to have been scraped off the bottom of a pan of hash browns.
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/dining/restaurant-review-meat-hook-sandwich-in-williamsburg-brooklyn.html?rref=dining&module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=Food&action=click®ion=FixedRight&pgtype=Multimedia