What made me realize this today was it's about 1:30 pm on a Thursday and I am trying to find a place to buy myself a traditional club sandwich--
You know, three layers of sliced and lightly toasted bread, plenty of mayonnaise to moisten that toasted bread and hold the layers together, freshly sliced tomato for moisture, and lettuce to soften the crunch bread from cutting the roof of your mouth. Finally, the centerpieces are delicate ham, turkey, and crispy-fried bacon. Sliced into 4 quarters, to many including myself it is THE most sandwich of sandwiches. It reminds me of summers by the pool in Arizona, where you would only get out of the water just long enough to scarf one corner down before plunging back into the pool to cool off.
--And to my dismay, I could not find a single restaurant or shop within walking distance of the Colorado State Capitol.
As I complained to my former roommate, he really gave my the idea to begin writing this blog when he responded "...It just seems so absurd you can't find basic dishes in Denver, everything is 'our take/interpretation on the classic club' etc...". And it's true. In Denver, you can find vegan wing shops, tacos of endless variety (none of which you can actually find on the street in mexico or other latino cuidads), and just about farm-to-table everything but you just can't find good, traditionally-made, american (or american-adopted) classics.
Denver is the home of the original toasted sub, Quiznos, and the longer I stay here the more concrete my belief becomes that Coloadans and their neighborhoods full of transplants must simply thing that anything between bread is a sandwich. This may be true in a context similar to "all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares" but to me, and I'm certain many others, a sandwich is meat, cheese, veggies, and spreads between two pieces of SLICED bread.
Believe me, I am no sandwich purest. I enjoy a jersey-style hoagie smothered in oil and vinegar, an Italian sub with spicy dressing, or even a toasted meatball or chicken pesto sub from time to time. But these are not the sandwiches I seek most days, especially since moving to Denver.
Most days when the sandwich craving hits, I want primarily good, solid ingredients.
If I have to settle for mass-produced meat, then I try to settle for nothing less than Boar's Head, but one of the greatest things about the reemergence of do-it-yourselfer, homesteader, back to the roots, type trends is there are more and more specialty butcher and delicatessen shops coming to local neighborhoods.
Bread, of course, is CRITICAL to a good sandwich. It is another "problem" that I run into at almost every sandwich shop I go to anymore. If I want something other than white then I'm stuck with a 90-seed grain bread, a sub roll, or a baguette. And don't even get me started on the abhorrent abomination to wheat and gluten that ciabatta is. NO THANK YOU. Whatever happened to sandwich bread?
Finally, I will leave you with a video I found while not sating my appetite for a club sandwich that assembles and almost perfect club sandwich. As the youtuber notes, his assembly differs from the classic because typically the ham and lettuce are on the bottom and turkey bacon and tomato are on top.
I finally caved and decided I would be having a club for dinner, which I will make from scratch.
