In Search Of…

I love sandwiches. At the top of the sandwich hierarchy, the gold standard, the Rolls Royce of lunches, is the turkey club sandwich. The combination of turkey, bacon, and mayonnaise is like the combination of hydrogen and oxygen, or the Captain and Tenille, or Bigfoot and inconclusive evidence.

Because of its simplicity, it should be easy for an eatery to create a satisfactory club sandwich. Over the past year, however, I’ve found that more and more sandwich joints have no idea how to make one. In general there’s three laws of the turkey club that seem to be broken, and the ‘chefs’ who put these abominations together should be ashamed.

First, turkey clubs need sourdough bread. Yes, you can serve it on whole wheat or in a bun, but it’s not the right way to do it. It would be like making cookies with carob chips, or wearing a coat made of felt. It’s just not acceptable, even though it’s functional.

Second, the turkey should never, ever be in cold cut form. Especially coming from a restaurant, no one should ever be brought a meat product that was cut from a loaf (exception, obviously, meatloaf. But no one orders meatloaf at a restaurant). Turkey in a club sandwich has to be actual pieces of turkey meat, ripped from its dead and cooked carcass. This year I’ve had three different club sandwiches that contained luncheon turkey meat, and one was so poorly conceived that it had one piece of turkey lunch meat in it. One! You can’t even taste luncheon meat if it’s not at least four pieces thick. It was like eating bread with a light dusting of turkey essential oil.

Finally - and perhaps the most bizarre - two of the club sandwiches I’ve had have featured cheese. Now I love cheese, and I will never, ever stop eating cheese for as long as I have a jaw, but cheese has no place in a turkey club sandwich. Do you put mushrooms in chocolate pudding? Or butter in a glass of wine? Of course not. Cheese is not a member of the club.

So where’s the best turkey club sandwich? I haven’t found anywhere that beats White Spot. They do it all right, and they have that combination of mayo and red relish secret Triple O sauce that, while sloppy, makes the club sandwich the hippest club in town.

Also, did you know White Spot now offers yam fries?

What I’m getting at is, establishments shouldn’t put things on their menu if the chef doesn’t even know how to make something correctly. Yeah yeah, experimentation is nice, but putting cheese in a club sandwich isn’t experimentation, it’s just stupid ignorance. It’s like what Gordon Ramsay always preaches to stupid moron chefs - get the simple stuff right first before you try something fancy. The fact that more and more chefs can’t get a club sandwich right ought to be embarassing.