I am Andy Rooney

Hey, time for me to complain again.

For the past week, I've been away on business. That means I've been eating out a lot. A lot to me would be twice a week, but this is every meal. There are only so many restaurants in the Alpharetta area, so we've gone to a couple of them more than once.

One place is an upscale (i.e. expensive) deli. And eating there twice, I can now firmly put my finger on what I hate about sandwiches at restaurants.

Keep in mind, that this hate is limited purely to sandwiches at restaurants; at home a sandwich can be the greatest food item ever. With the right bread, condiments and trimmings, it can be a square meal in and of itself. I recall some ham sandwiches piled high with alfalfa sprouts on home-made dill bread from my youth that touched on enlightening... but I digress.

Restaurant sandwiches usually have very good trimmings. There's a variety of stuff to put on it, all kinds of dressings, mayonnaises, mustards, roasted vegetables, and everything else that makes a good sandwich great. The bread isn't usually stellar, but it is rarely bad. They are usually overloaded with meat too; up to a quarter pound of the "body" of the sandwich. The fact that they are made by somebody else can only help their case. So what do these sandwiches lack?

Structural integrity.

If you get a turkey on wheat from a deli, you get a ball of shredded turkey that is slapped between two pieces of bread with some shredded lettuce and a couple tomatoes all in the center of the bread. And then, they cut it in half for you. Of course, when you cut a ball in half, it's going to just fall apart, so they use a couple fancy toothpicks to hold it together. When you try to eat it, you either start in the middle and eat all the meat out of the bread, or you start at the edge and half the meat falls out.

This is unacceptable.

A sandwich should stay together using nothing but the force of gravity. It's really simple how to make it work: spread that meat out. Don't make it a ball. Make it a layer, not unlike another piece of bread. Then put your stuff on top (evenly, not center-loaded), and the last piece of bread. If you must cut it in half, it will stay together this way.

Jason's Deli: I'm talking to you.