Archive for sandwiches

the sandwich nazi

September 24, 2007 at 10:54 pm · Filed under american, sandwiches

Grinders Submarine Sandwiches
2069 Antioch Ct., Oakland (Montclair District)

Photo: mine except for Phil, that’s from the SF Chronicle.

Ever see that episode of Seinfeld? The one with the “Soup Nazi”? Well, there’s a Sandwich Nazi in Oakland for you to check out.

I think that “Nazi” is a strong term. The guy is just firm, especially if you dilly-dally around your order. He’s super efficient, which is fair since you can customize your sandwich with about a billion different options. Please don’t mind it when he asks you if you want pickles, yellow or spicy mustard, onions, your sandwich hot or cold and about 20 other sandwich specifications in a rapid-fire manner, he’s got people to feed and doesn’t have time to help you decide.

He also doesn’t allow you to be on your celly while you’re in his store. I actually appreciate this since people tend to talk HELLA loud while they’re on the phone. And I don’t care what people say, you’re also very, very distracted while you talk on the phone (I’m lookin at you girlies on the phone while you drive erratically).

Grinders is a tiny sandwich shop in downtown Montclair. Oh, Montclair, how do I describe thee? It’s not actually a town, it’s more like a section of Oakland near Piedmont. This particular area is filled with little shops and eateries that are upscale-ish. Sure, there’s a Starbucks, a Noah’s, and a Jamba, but there’s also a Peets and trendy mom and pop operations and boutiques that line the cramped sidewalks of what is essentially a 5 block area. There are occasional festivals (music, arts and crafts, and the like), plus a farmers’ market that probably rivals the one at Ferry Plaza. When there isn’t some kind of event, the place is still crowded and parking just as hard to come by.

But I digress.

Grinders sort of doesn’t fit with the place, but at the same time fits well. Montclair feels like a smaller version of Walnut Creek or maybe Laurel Heights, but it’s also very small town-ish, which is what Grinders feels like to me. This is because it’s a small operation, run by the same guy, day in and day out. There’s also another part to it: how you order. Go to Grinders, make your perfect sandwich, and then SAVE IT in what has got to be a massive database. That’s right, your order is saved and phil zackler wants you to stop changing his sandwich!next time you come in, just order the Joe Schmoe and you’re good. Neat, right? A warning: make your name hard to spell or don’t tell your friends your favorite place is Grinders. Apparently, any kid can come in off the street and edit your order. Don’t order the Phil Zackler… I’m told the guy would stop by Grinders for lunch a lot during his high school days and every time he’d order his beloved sandwich, someone had changed it. It ended with him buying a 20-inch sub, or something. Don’t feel bad for Phil, he’s going to be a senator or something.

I digress again.

The interior of Grinders is small. There’s a counter on one side with the sandwich nazi sitting in front of his computer, waiting for you to hurry up and order. To his right, several sandwich makers hard at work. Opposite the counter are boxes with a side cut out, displaying the variety of chips for your choosing. You can get fountain drinks or cans or bottles of whatever. There are cookies of varying age (fresh, day old, two day old, etc). As expected, there’s no place to sit and eat your sandwich. Please, you’d just be wasting space and making noise. Along the same lines, there isn’t really room to wait near the counter for your order, so most wait outside and shove their way in or out to get their sub. It’s not really customer-friendly is what I’m trying to say.

Near the ordering spot there’s luckily a paper menu outlining your choices. You can pick and choose everything off the menu. Say you want a turkey with bacon, avocado, no mayo. Sure, you can do that, but be prepared to answer a slew of questions about other toppings. The guy is a bit intimidating, so I tend to answer the questions before I can really think about what I truly would like. Overall, though, it doesn’t really make too much of a difference if I get black pepper on my sandwich or not. There are specific sandwiches you can order, like the Terminator, which is roast beef, ham, and cheese. You’ll still need to talk about bread type and other toppings, though.

The sandwiches themselves are tasty (they should be, I picked out everything myself!). The ingredients are fresh and quality. The sandwiches are made only after you’ve ordered and they’re pretty quick about it. While the ordering process is daunting, the range of choice is refreshing. You can also call in your order, which requires you to know the menu a bit or have a sandwich order on their database. You don’t get to talk to anyone, you just leave a message.

Overall: A tasty spot with super variety. Don’t expect service with a smile.

Rating: 9/10

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welcome to japantown

August 22, 2007 at 11:08 pm · Filed under american, asian, breakfast, brunch, hawaiian, japanese, sandwiches, sushi

May’s Coffee Shop08150712352.jpg
Kintetsu Mall, Japantown
1737 Post St. (near Buchanan St.)

So as stated in the last post, I got a new jobbie. Whoo hoo! While I’ll miss working in Chinatown (because, face it, where else will you get a nice lunch for under $1?), Japantown is my new love. I knew going into the area would be dangerous, it always is. You can lose an arm and a leg out there what with the good, expensive food and all the stuff you could buy! Never have I been so sad to have my cell phone – it doesn’t have a place to hook on a charm! And here I am, amongst a gazillion amazing charms. Life is rough.

Anyway, back to the food. Japanese food is a hardcore favorite of mine. When in doubt, Japanese will do just fine. Sadly, it’s almost always pricey. It would be a challenge to find an affordable lunch place…. We’ll see how I fare.

My first day consisted of a tour of the several different office buildings my organization is housed in. On the way from one to another, my supervisor took me on a detour and showed me a few things. We walked by May’s Coffee Shop and it looked less pricey than the rest. Sweet.

At lunchtime, my first official “working” lunch in Japantown, instead of opting for Denny’s (probably the most affordable place in the area, but not, uh, up to snuff for the area), I went back to the mall and checked out May’s menu. Lo and behold – they serve eggs! May’s became my new favorite spot.

The place isn’t really a restaurant.  It’s a little like an eatery with a counter you order at and picnic style tables surrounding it.  It’s nice in that it’s under skylights so it’s bright and sunny.  Not so great when it’s warm out, though.   You get the mall foot traffic walkin by and looking at you, but whatever.  This place is much better than any food court in any mall.  Ok, well, except for maybe the Westfield mall downtown.  It’s quaint and not intimidating at all (compared to the fancy Japanese restaurants throughout the mall).

Let’s back up for just a second. Last week bbg and I went to Mazatlan, Mexico for vacation. While there I had an epiphany: breakfast is my favorite meal. I love scrambled eggs with tons of pepper and a little bit of ketchup. Other than that, who doesn’t love sausage and pancakes and waffles and potatoes and everything else that comes with breakfast? Part of it has got to be sentimental. When I was growing up (and even today, though I don’t live there anymore) my dad would always make breakfast on the weekends. We’d have eggs and fried rice or potatoes and sausage or pancakes or whatever. So it’s a bit nostalgic for me. But seriously, most of it is because it tastes great. And it’s really difficult to mess up, so it’s always gonna be pretty satisfying.

Anyway, so yeah. For just under $5 you can get a combo with the following: eggs how you like them, toast, potatoes as you like them (hash or home fries with peppers and onions) or rice, and your choice of meat (sausage, spam!!, ham, bacon). Pretty amazing, I think, so I order that. The wait is about 10 minutes.

Beyond what I got, there are a variety of other combos to choose from and breakfast is served all day (again, hella awesome). You can order other breakfast items like waffles and omelettes. And of course, there are lunch items, the usual diner fare: sandwiches, salads, and hamburgers. There are Asian things like curries, Asian type sandwiches, hawaiian stuff, different udons, shaved ice (!), and spam masubi! There are specials everyday like spaghetti and stews, so basically it’s pretty hodgepodge (note the plethora of tags).

Like I said before, breakfast is easy, so no big complaints here. It was a bit greasy, so the shop on the whole is more of a diner than anything else. Or I guess coffee shop. Go figure. The eggs weren’t really fluffy, but they were good and cooked well. The home fried potatoes come cooked with slices of bell peppers and onions, which I tend to avoid in general. I tried a couple of the veggies, blah. Skipped the toast and the meat (I wasn’t that hungry), which was probably smart since those items would’ve increased my grease intake. Strangely, I couldn’t find any black pepper around for my eggs. I thought it’d be in the shaker next to the salt, but its contents turned out to be sesame seeds. Huh. Didn’t matter, they had ketchup and that’s just fine with me.

Overall: Probably your best bet in the neighborhood for lots of good-tasting food for a more than reasonable price. The menu’s filled with your basics, plus some Asian stuff, though a little greasy. But hey, I’m ok with that. I’ll be back. A lot.

Rating: 7/10

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sweet or savory, i like ’em all

June 2, 2007 at 5:26 pm · Filed under breakfast, brunch, crepes, french, sandwiches, tea & coffee

Crepevine
*216 Church St. (x Market St.)
624 Irving St. (x 7th Ave.)
2301 Fillmore St. (x Clay St.)
*5600 College Ave. (x Ocean View Dr.), Oakland

*Locations I’ve been to

photo: yelp.com, Oakland location, but they all feature this menu.

I first went to Crepevine because my friend Nancy demanded me to. We went with a group of friends to the one in Oakland, not too far from Rockridge BART. At the time I thought it was a nice little local spot with some good food.

When I moved to the City and started exploring, I discovered a Crepevine on Irving St. and thought to myself, “Hey! They have one in SF, too!” As I made my way to other parts of the City I soon discovered that Crepevine is a small chain, with two additional locations in the Fillmore and the Castro. I felt silly.

But that hardly mattered since Crepevine offers some quality food. The restaurants are usually in busy streets, snuggled between small shops and coffee spots. All of the SF locations make sense: Irving, Castro, Fillmore…. all popular hangouts for city folk, places that you’d probably go to looking for brunch.

Crepevine has a pretty large menu of sandwiches, salads, breakfast foods (pancakes, french toast), and coffees. The draw, though, are its crepes and omelets, so it sells itself as a breakfast/brunch/lunch spot. There are lots of options and the combinations are somewhat predictable for all the food, but I suppose you go with what works. Both times I went I ended up ordering the Santa Fe crepe, and both times it was great.

Crepes come with a side of salad and a large portion of potatoes. The salad is a simple green salad with a light, vinegarette/thousand island kind of dressing that’s good if it doesn’t drench the greens. The potatoes make the meal look good, but fall short of impressing me. The potatoes are warm and soft on the inside, but unfortunately they’re overcooked on the outside, rendering them too tough and chewy. They’re flavored, but it was hard to figure out with what since they had a strange other taste, maybe from the fat or whatever they were cooked with. They’re ok, but I love potatoes and if I couldn’t bring myself to finish this portion, they must not have been so great. What I did manage to eat, I ate with lots of ketchup.

The crepe itself, however, was excellent. The crepe is thin, soft and a little crispy at the edges. The Santa Fe comes with apple sausage, cheese, salsa fresca, and scrambled eggs. Everything inside was well portioned and tasty. The sausage was a nice blend of sweet and salty, very juicy. It mixed well with the cheese. The eggs were also very good and went well with the salsa. Usually I eat eggs with ketchup (it was how I was raised, sorry if it’s strange) and pepper, but since everything mixed so well, I didn’t need any of that, which surprised me.

One of my lunch mates had an omelet and from where I was sitting, it didn’t look that great. I expect omelets to be eggs mixed with its ingredients and then cooked. Apparently here the egg is cooked and the ingredients are folded in, sort of like an enclosed pita. The egg “shell” was thin and wrapped a large serving of spinach and whatever else was supposed to come with it. On the one hand it’s great that the omelet was stuffed to the brim with her favorite things, on the other, the proportion of egg to insides upset me. Maybe I’m just sensitive.

The sweet crepes are difficult to screw up. They serve them large and heavy on whatever it is that makes them sweet: whip cream, strawberries, chocolate, apples and cinnamon, bananas, caramel, whatever. You’ll find the usual sweet crepe combinations here, they all seem good. When I went to the restaurant in Oakland, my dinner mates and I (about 6 of us total) split two of the sweet crepes, and that was more than enough. Very decadent, which is how desserts should be.

The interior is like a large coffee shop, with wooden floors and plenty of tables. You order at the counter and they’ll bring your food to you, so long as they remember to give you your number. Most of the places are on nice main streets, with windows you can look out and people watch. Spacious and homey, a nice place to hang out for some grub.

Overall: Great main dishes, side dishes leave something to be desired. Sweet crepes are excellent. Wide variety, so you should find something you like. Good combinations, nice place for brunch.  But, at $8 a pop, not some place super necessary to visit.

Rating: 7/10

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middle schoolers love this place

April 28, 2007 at 3:24 am · Filed under sandwiches

Freddie’s Sandwiches0418071346.jpg
300 Francisco St. (x Stockton St.) – Show me!
Cuisine: sandwiches

When I first started working at Francisco Middle School, I wondered what/where everyone was talking about whenever they mentioned “Freddie’s”. “Let’s go to Freddie’s” or “Did you go to Freddie’s” and “Is that from Freddie’s?” Was this a really popular kid at school? What the hell was going on? Turns out it’s a sandwich shop literally across the street from the main campus.

Freddie’s sandwiches are like gold at FMS. When mentors and mentees in our mentoring program meet for the first time, we buy everyone Freddie’s sandwiches so that the kids will remember to show up. Kids will yell at random people on the street walking by, asking them to buy sandwiches for them (FMS is a closed campus) – the middle school version of buying alcohol for high schoolers. On the snow trip I went on with the middle schoolers, my camera was dropped and broken, but then a kid fixed it. I paid him for his help with a Freddie’s sandwich. Seriously, you can use these things as incentives for just about anything.

And with good reason. The sandwiches are pretty good and remind me of Cheese ‘n’ Stuff in Berkeley. You can get a small sandwich for $5 – $6, which is more than enough for lunch. It comes with the regular stuff, but there’s a wide variety of meats and breads to choose from. My favs include the dutch sweet roll and the soft sourdough roll. They also have a veggie sandwich, plus you can always get falafel. There are regular add-ons for about 35 cents more, like avacado and cranberry sauce – which I really appreciate with turkey sandwiches and as a result almost always get.

Beyond sandwiches, they have some stuff like macaroni, pasta, or potato salad. There’s a pretty nice selection of drinks, everything from your everyday soda to vitamin water and beer! They also have tons of chips and newspapers for sale. That’s about it, though. It’s a very no frills place, with no seating except for a bench and a few plastic chairs outside. Also the same guy (I guess the owner – maybe Freddie himself!) works the register. He’s an ok guy, sometimes he rushes you during lunch time, but that’s understandable when the line’s out the door. You can avoid this if you call in your order, a wise decision as 11:30-1:30pm are their busiest hours.

Overall: I eat here a lot because it’s pretty good, but mostly because it’s convenient. Nothin’ spectacular about the sandwiches, but then again, how great can a simple sandwich be?

Rating: 8/10

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lunch crunch

April 24, 2007 at 5:50 am · Filed under health food, sandwiches, smoothie

the nature stopThe Nature Stop
1336 Grant St. (x Vallejo St.) – Show me!
Cuisine: health food, sandwiches, smoothie

Just up the street from my current office and a stone’s throw from Washington Square Park, this health food store/deli is a great stop for lunch. You’ll find all your favorite healthy goodies here: kettle chips, granola, Annie’s frozen food, Odwalla bars, Vitamin Water… plus organic EVERYTHING. They have a small, but good-sized selection of fresh produce, all organic. There’s also canned goods, dry stuff, and plenty of snacks! There are batches of granola and trail mix, tons of chips (kettle, pita, tortilla), yogurts, cheeses, dates, baklava, cookies, and CANDY! Yes, healthy candy! Bars boast high percentages of cacao (very popular these days), and funny flavors (i.e., lavendar). Everything’s healthy and decently priced. It’s not Trader Joe’s in terms of overall selection and price, but that’s the trade-off when supporting the local businesses. You get to eat well and feel good. Whee!

While the selection of snacks is wonderful, the deli counter/smoothie and juice bar is a gem. There’s a great variety of smoothies and juices promising to cure everything from lagging energy to womanly ails. I’ve never tried them. Sorry. I’m sure they’re good.

What I love are the sandwiches!

A funny observation about sandwiches: anyone can make them. There’s really not that much to them. If I really wanted to, I’m sure I’m more than capable of buying all the ingredients and making the same exact sandwich as any sandwich stop, all by myself. There’s no secret sauce, hell, there’s not even any cooking involved. In general, what makes a good sandwich is the quality of the ingredients and the knack to combine them correctly. With all that said, I still find myself buying tons of sandwiches for lunch instead of taking the time to make my own. I don’t know, maybe it tastes better when someone else makes it.

nature stop turkey sandwichBack to the Nature Stop. They have a hummus/pita and falafel/pita option, which are both tasty, and next to the counter/bar is a pretty great salad bar. The salads are make-your-own with the usual fare, plus Annie’s organic dressings to chose from. As for the sandwiches, there are your standard sandwich meats to choose from and your sandwich is made to order. Sandwiches come with some great add-ons: lettuce, tomato, mayo, dijon mustard, red onions, sliced carrots and cucumbers. All on wheat!

Sandwiches are about $4-$5, which is cheap for the neighborhood and average for sandwiches. There’s a bit of a line for sandwiches/smoothies/juices, as well as another line for the register, if you wander in around lunch time. After 1pm, though, it’s well worth the wait.

Overall: A great place to pick up lunch and a snack for the park.

Rating: 8/10

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