#12 In-house Roast Beef

Cold roast beef is one of my favorite sandwiches. It was my childhood go-to and back in the '80s there was a deli in a stripmall in Vallejo that roasted their own beef and had some amazing sourdough which instilled in me a love of sandwiches that has served me well until this day.

Tat's ain't that place, sadly. On the list of hits and misses this kind of falls in the middle, but it definitely isn't worth ordering again.  I hate to see my love letter to Tat's turn into a "what to avoid list" but the last thing I'm going to do is blow hot up air up the internet's ass over some mediocre sandwich.

There's not much more to this than the Turkey.  I didn't learn my lesson and forgot to leave out the "seasonings" and the chopped onion. Those don't make or break this though, and at the heart the problem is that their house roast beef isn't great. The insult to injury is that they are very, very skimpy with it. You can see that there's barely the better part of two slices of beef on the sandwich.



Now I'm going to have to go find a good roast beef sandwich to wash away the disappointment.

#11 Sausage

That was ten days ago.

So was that.

I took me ten days to finally write this simply because I had high hopes for this sandwich and it was a fucking mess. Not that it was all that bad, but it was a serious disappointment. The sausage was a bit dry and hard, it was cut into chunks that were far from bite sized, and the whole thing was almost immediately a soggy mess.  I ended up pulling out my pocket knife to cut up the sausage and had to wrap the second half to keep it from falling apart.  This whole thing is about how awesome Tat's is, but in this case Tat's was far from awesome and that's not a lot of fun to write about.

#10 Tat's Jambalaya (w/ Brisket sandwich)

When in a drunken haze I originally conceived this whole mess, I looked through the Tat's menu and just started counting shit.  I included salads and sides and the major variations of the prime items (Chicken, Tuna, and Egg Salad sandwiches all separately, for example).  It ended up at 52 and that seemed ideal for my plan. The downside was that this meant that meal #51 was probably going to be me eating some Tastykakes.  Not exactly compelling.

My plan for each of the menu items that aren't a sandwich, or at least aren't large enough to constitute a meal in and of themselves, is to eat them along with a sandwich that isn't part of the 52.  This is going to allow me to squeeze in some of the unlisted specials, and to come up with a few weird-as-shit hybrid sandwiches.  "If you don't see it...ask!" is the motto on the Tat's sign, and at some point I'm going to take them up on that.

The only person I know who is as willing to dedicate his time and effort to pointless (ie: fucking rad) acts of consumptive self destruction as myself is Chris, the man behind Idiot's Delight.  He pointed out the special at Tat's today and I sure as shit wasn't going to abstain.

To cross one of the 52 off the list along with my brisket, I ordered a cup of the Tat's jambalaya.

 

I've been wondering for quite a while what the hell was going on with Tat's having jambalaya on the menu.  Maybe this is an east coast thing I'm ignorant of. The thing is, I fucking love jambalaya. I make a pretty fucking mean brown jambalaya with roast chicken and andouille. No disrespect to the creole style of red jambalaya, but the Cajuns have this thing locked the fuck up.

I opened up the plastic container of Tat's jambalaya and thought maybe they'd accidentally given me a side of marinara.  Digging in, it got weirder.  Below a thick layer of tomatoes was a layer of rice.  As I started mixing it up things got even weirder.  There were sausage chunks, which I'd figured on, but there were also a whole bunch of corn kernels.  This has to be somebody's mom's recipe, there's no other explanation for the weirdness going on here.

This was a bowl of tomatoes stewed with garlic, chunks of what I believe was andouille, although unsmoked and rubbery.  There was a pretty good spice kick to it, and it was as warm and hearty as you could ask for.  Once I put my confusion as to why exactly I was eating stewed tomatoes and rice instead of jambalaya aside I was pretty happy about the whole thing.  It's damned tasty.  Italian jambalaya?  I don't know what the hell to call it, but I have a feeling I might end up craving it in the middle of the night when I can't sleep.

But on to the main course...

The disclaimer I should give about bbq is this: I make a lot of my own bbq, and I have friends who are bbq nuts as well.  I rarely eat bbq at restaurants around Seattle anymore because most of it is shit and the stuff I make at home is easily superior to anything I've found, and I've spent time at a lot of local bbq spots.

Brisket is a funny thing, because it's one of my favorite types of bbq, it's not that hard to make, and yet it's the hardest to find in a remotely edible form in Seattle.  The best brisket I've ever eaten was smoked by Chris of the Mop Sauce and Two Smoking Barrels BBQ team. One day I hope to make it down to Austin and hit up Franklin Barbecue, but until then I have no expectation of eating anything on par with Chris' brisket.  The point of all of that being, when someone says they have brisket, my first reaction is excitement, followed by despair as I realize it's not going to be any good.  My buddy Wes and I refer to being fucked over by a bad food choice as being "brisketted" due to a time when I ordered brisket and waded through a pile of what most closely resembled rehydrated beef jerky while he consumed some of the fattiest spare ribs I've ever seen.

Tat's brisket sandwich, all of that said, is pretty damned good.  It has no bark, and while there's plenty of smoke flavor there's no real smoke ring to be seen around the meat, so I wonder what goes on in their in-house smoker.  But these guys aren't a bbq house and they don't claim to be.  Given that, their brisket is better than what you will find at most places in town who DO make that claim.  Tat's brisket is sliced paper-think and is tender enough that a bit of pressure causes it to fall apart and almost resemble chopped brisket (as in the picture above).  Open the sandwich up, though, and you can see that it's very carefully sliced, beautiful brisket.  The slaw is good, as always, better than any BBQ place in Seattle other than the now-relocated Rhodie's which used to sit at Denny and Broad.  The sauce is brown sugar sweet and honestly pretty reminiscent of KC Masterpiece. It could use a lot of apple cider vinegar and/or being replaced by a totally different sauce.  But in the context of the sandwich it works fine and I'm sure it's a crowd pleaser.

Nit picking aside, as you'd expect, it's fucking good.  I'd eat it again in a heartbeat, if I get many of those left after this whole project is said and done.

#9 Hoagie Steak

As much of an institution as the cheesesteak is, there's two variants of almost equal importance.

1. The pizza steak
2. The hoagie steak

There's a group of people, a subculture, that would argue that there is a third: the chicken cheesesteak.  These people are fucking turds who deserve to have their mouths washed out with diarrhea.  In fact, even the inclusion of a "chicken cheesesteak" on the Tat's menu is an absolute disgrace.  A person of higher moral character than myself might choose to abstain from even eating here based on that item, and they would be a better person than me.  "Chicken cheesesteak" - heavy on the air quotes.

That is Tat's failing.  My failing is that I've never had a hoagie steak, or a hoagie cheesesteak.  Never.  Had a hundred cheesesteaks.  Had a dozen or two pizza steaks.  Had more hoagies than anyone should eat and still be able to fit through a regular sized doorway.  Never had their bastard offspring.

My buddy Ethan met up with me and we broke my hoagie steak cherry, as anticlimactic of an event as that is.

"Hoagie Steak. Topped with lettuce, tomato, onion."

The Tat's menu is wild about capitalization and sometimes straight up terse.  I did mine up this time, provolone, onions, and fried peppers.  The french rolls today were super soft, there was no crust on it and that was a little disappointing, but it saved the roof of my mouth some pain so I shouldn't complain too much.  Other than that there's not a single bad thing I can say about this sandwich. I devoured it before I even realized I had started eating it.  I could go in for two more right now. 

Unlike my last encounter, the beef was fantastic this time.  The provolone is always a good choice, and the onions and peppers really shouldn't be optional.  The lettuce and tomato take this sandwich in a totally wholesome direction, which for a cheesesteak is pretty weird.  It's like the sandwich equivalent of an attractive lady dressed up as a slutty librarian.  The contrast between the virgin (lettuce, tomato, onions) and the whore (fucking cheesesteak, dude) is more than the sum of its parts.

Go eat one.  Remember to not stand up until your sandwich boner subsides.

#8 Sausage, Egg, & Cheese

Holy shit you guys.

I was having a crap morning and getting antsy sitting at work, so I hauled my ass out of my chair and trekked through the rain to Tat's this morning. Next in line on the breakfast menu was Pepper, Egg, & Cheese... but I was unhappy and a vegetarian sandwich wasn't going to come close to cutting it.  I skipped straight to the Sausage, Egg, & Cheese with Provolone.

When I'm old and dying I hope I look back on this as one of the better decisions I've made in my life.  Like not believing in god and buying a giant flat screen plasma tv.

Without getting into too much masturbatory food hyperbole let me just say this: go eat this fucking sandwich. Wait until it's pissing rain and you're having a bad day and then go get 8" of absolutely fucking delicious breakfast sausage patties chopped up topped with fried eggs and melted provolone.  For $5.  Five fucking dollars.