Between the Bread

Swallow your sandwich and breathe a sigh of relief: Ike's Place has made it through the first round of its legal hurdles. I haven't been reporting every new development in this increasingly complicated case, in which the landlord is demanding $1 million and threatening to evict the stellar sandwich shop because its booming business creates huge crowds. But I am glad to report that today, summary judgment concluded in favor of Ike's.

That means the possibility of an eviction with just three days' notice is off the table. According to SFoodie, "Ike's landlord will have to decide whether he wants to take the case to trial, or engage in some kind of settlement." I, for one, hope this is the last we hear about it, for the sake of Ike's and sandwiches everywhere.

Breaded chicken between more bread? Why not? Last Sunday Andrew made chicken cutlets, flattened and coated in a breadcrumb, lemon zest, and parsley mixture. He topped the chicken with arugula, lightly dressed in lemon-shallot vinaigrette.

The flavor pairing of bitter greens and tangy fruit was too delicious not to revive in a sandwich Monday night. We served the golden slabs of chicken on Acme's green onion slab bread (highly recommend) with tomato and leftover arugula. It was delicious, if enormous.

• The greatest hits of NYC's hero sandwiches — Serious Eats
• Laura Werlin's tips for great grilled cheese — YumSugar
• Barros Luco: Chile's star sandwich — Eat the Sink
• Marin Sun Farms burger, from the butcher to your plate — The Hamblogger
• Can KFC outdo the Double Down? Doubtful — Huffington Post Food
• Subway's whole grain bread is hardly healthy — Slashfod

Does Friendly's new Grilled Cheese BurgerMelt one-up the KFC Double Down in decadence? It's a patty melt made from two hot grilled cheese sandwiches instead of bread and dressed with lettuce, tomato, and mayo. (The mayo seems like overkill, doesn't it?) Apparently, it's even worse for you than the Double Down, with 1500 calories, 97 grams fat, and 2090 mgs sodium, but also delicious.

Though this new menu item may seem like a sign of the apocalypse, making a burger with grilled cheese sandwiches isn't a new idea. A very similar sandwich, called the Logan County Burger, led Katie Lee Joel to victory in the Burger Bash at the Food Network's NYC Wine and Food Festival in 2008.

No matter who's making it, I admire the ingenuity, but I doubt I could eat one. How about you?

This is the mustard that made me love mustard — and I really, really love mustard. I'm sure I had mustard before Honeycup Mustard, but it wasn't memorable. This one, however, flavors my earliest condiment and sandwich memories.

I hadn't had it in years, so when I found a jar at my local Lucky supermarket, I brought it home to see if it was as good as I remembered, now that I've tried dozens of other mustards. I immediately remembered its odd gelatinous quality, almost like an apple butter, and the familiar flavor immediately brought me back to childhood. Though it's hard for me to pick a favorite mustard — after all, variety is the condiment of life — Honeycup definitely holds its own.

I'm sure my family had Honeycup as a kid because it was one of the first "gourmet" mustards available in my hometown. My mom used it to re-create the grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich with hot-sweet mustard served at a local restaurant called Dabo's; incidentally, those sandwiches are one of my most cherished early sandwich memories. I think it's very fitting that Honeycup Mustard was established in 1978, the same year I was.

There you have it: my seminal mustard. I even managed to make it through this whole post without saying "cuts the mustard." Are you a mustard person?

I can't decide if "biparti-sandwich" is a terrible pun or a great one, but I was excited to see sandwiches in the spotlight on last night's Top Chef. After Susan Feniger got booted off Top Chef Masters for making a sandwich with coconut jam, one Between the Bread reader wondered if the show is antisandwich. But after last night's Quickfire challenge, it's obvious that Top Chef believes in sandwich! Given, sandwiches are a pretty easy challenge (or should be) for a bunch of professional chefs. So to make the Quickfire harder, pairs of chefs had to cook with one hand each while wearing a conjoined apron. In the words of one contestant, "Who got high and came up with this?" I could say the same thing about many delicious sandwiches.

Read on to watch the video.

I was pleased by my first trip to Chez Carla today, though sadly they were out of my first bread choice, ciabatta. However, this sweet wheat was actally perfect with the smoky salmon, salty capers, and creamy feta. Onions and pesto mayo added a sharp complement.

I've never had a bad sandwich at The Sentinel, but I've complained about the place, mostly because I think it's overhyped. As a sandwich lover and a fan of Denis Leary's restaurant, Canteen, I really want to love his sandwiches: a daily-changing menu of homemade, sustainable ingredients on fresh-baked bread.

On my first three visits, I've been disappointed by the haphazard construction, which to me is one of the most important factors of sandwich-making. Though I know the lunch rush is very busy, the sandwiches felt thrown together, which seems unacceptable for a place that always ends up on lists of the city's best sandwiches. I judge it by higher standards, but I keep giving The Sentinel a chance. On my last visit, I was very impressed. Find out why.

The cheesesteak pretzel may seem newfangled (and gross) but its lineage might be linked to one of England's indigenous foods, the Cornish pasty. (That's pronounced PASS-tee, not PASTE-tee, lest you have visions of strippers.)

Traced back to 16th century England, these handheld pies predate the golden age of sandwiches and may have inspired some of America's classics 'wiches, from the cheesesteak to the Reuben.

Resembling a turnover or an empanada, these semicircular, crusty pies provided easy underground lunches for miners in Cornwall and, later, Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The workers' wives would bake the pies, often marking the miner's initials in the dough and stuffing them with "courses": meat, vegetables, and other savory fillings on one side, and a sweet fruity dessert on the other.

A meat-and-potato meal, popular pasty stuffings include thinly sliced steak or ground beef, onions, tubers, and turnips. So you see, the cheesesteak pretzel could be called a pasty variation, if an ill-advised one. Apparently, the two-course pasty is a lost art, but that's one of my favorite parts of the pasty story. I think it's primed for a comeback.

Source: Flickr User Joyosity