#39 Special: Chicken Cordon Bleu Hoagie

If you're not following Tat's on twitter then you should be. They mentioned this morning that they were doing a special, and I was long overdue. The Cordon Bleu Hoagie is one of the three special sandwiches you'll see most often at Tat's, although there are a few others. The other two you'll see most often are the Italian Roast Pork and the BBQ Brisket.

"Grilled marinated chicken breast w/ ham and Swiss, LTO and honey mustard spread" is what they say about this. If you've had the Chicken Steak then you know that, while chicken is normally the toilet water of the food world, Tat's does it really well. This sandwich follows in that same mold.

This sandwich has it all - it's big, hot, saucy, cheesy, and has a great combination of flavors. The honey mustard spread's sweetness contrasts with the raw onion. I highly recommend not fucking with the setup on this thing - the way it comes is masterful, it wouldn't be as good if you removed any one component.

I've passed this sandwich by a lot of times because it seemed like such a weird schtick. And today 9,000 fat white dudes will walk right past that 'Special' sign and order a Tat'strami, secure in their unwavering dedication. And they're not wrong. That shit is good, but as this blog winds down I am really happy to see how well this sandwich exemplifies why I've made an attempt to hit all the sandwiches on the menu: there are a lot of gems that are often overlooked.

#38 Italian Copa, Peppers, Egg & Cheese

In general, Tat's breakfast sandwiches are extraordinarily tasty, under appreciated, and a great value. I'm getting towards the end of my journey through the menu, but I've got a handful of breakfast sandwiches that I'm really excited about to eat left.

They misspell it on the menu, but the coppa and peppers breakfast sandwich is great. Coppa, also known as Capicolla, is one of the holy trinity of cured meats that you'll find on a classic Italian sub sandwich. Normally if you get the good stuff it's sliced paper thin and is super flavorful. Tat's is sliced a bit thicker, and is more pink than red, a bit strange, but tasty in this context. The peppers are as good as you'd expect, the same as you should be getting on your steak. The eggs are intermittently overcooked, as was the case today. Regardless, it's a hell of a breakfast sandwich, with three caveats.

1. I got American, where I normally get provolone. It ended up looking more like a Velveeta shmeer than the gooey melted mess I was hoping for.

2. This one's on me, I shouldn't have gotten this to go. I only waited five minutes to eat it, but that was long enough that most of the cheese set up and went from melty to ... not.

3. This is the gift I wish I could give to every bad burrito and sandwich maker in the whole wide world: spread that shit out. A little bit of the sandwich, shown above, looks great because some of the cheese has dripped down in front of it obscuring the bad construction. The rest looks like this:

All egg on the left, all peppers in the middle, and all cheese and coppa on the right. People don't eat sandwiches seam-up, they eat them crust-up. If Sandwich 101 is "put some shit between bread" then Sandwich 102 is "make every bite uniform." In this case, the main reason the cheese got nasty was that it was half situated outside of the roll, so the hot elements of the sandwich didn't keep it warm enough to stay liquid.

The folks at Tat's are awesome and I'm a huge fan, but occasionally you get a sloppily made sandwich. Won't stop me from ordering it again, although in the future I'll learn my lesson and not get American on to-go sandwiches, that one is on me.

#37 Chicken CheeseSteak

This is the last of the steaks on the Tat's menu. I'm trying to push through because I desperately wanted another Hoagie Steak. Honestly, the Chicken Steak was the least appealing of them, and one I've never had before, here or anywhere else.

I got mine with onions and fried peppers, I mixed up my usual Provolone today and went American. It was a pretty great choice, and I remembered why American was my old go-to for regular Cheese Steaks at other places. It's not as flavorful as Provolone, but it melts amazingly and has an even better flavor and consistency than the often cloying whiz option.

I ate in this time, I'd sworn to myself that I'd only ever eat at Tat's whenever I get a steak. It's a sandwich that just doesn't travel well, and Tat's is good enough that you should just give it its due and grab a table. It came out and, this picture just doesn't do the enormity of the 8" any justice. It's enormous. It takes up almost the entire basket. It was steaming and the smell was ridiculous, I couldn't help myself and just dove in. It was hot off the griddle and was way too hot for my sad little mouth. I burned my tongue. And then, overwhelmed by the sheer magic of the sandwich, I took another bite... and another... and another. I ended up with a few gnarly burns on my tongue and lips. I've never been driven to such masochism by a sandwich before. It was painful but entirely worth it.

The entire point behind this stupid blog is to eat some sandwiches on the enormous Tat's menu that I would have otherwise skipped. This sandwich certainly qualifies, and it's one of the clear diamonds in the rough, a magic combination of juicy chicken, beautiful melted cheese, super tasty grilled onions and peppers, and a fantastically warm and steamy roll to hold it all together. It's the hot girl next door of sandwiches. Chicken? Doesn't hold a lot of appeal for me. In this case it's phenomenal, though, and beyond that the sandwich is really more than the sum of its parts. This goes near the top of my list for things I'll revisit once I finish the menu, and I'd put it up against the Tat'strami as one of the top sandwiches that you can get on the entire menu. Go get one, or two, and don't skimp on the onions and fried peppers.

#36 Reuben

"Tat's Corned Beef w/ kraut, Swiss cheese & Russian dressing on Rye bread."

... and a pickle. I started eating it because I was so frustrated with how hard it was to unwrap. Some sort of uncontrollable animal instinct.

I'm apparently much less jaded today then when I ate the very similar New Yorker back in April. Maybe it's because I'm coming off the heels of having to cross the Egg Salad off of my list. Maybe it's because I haven't just endured 8 months of darkness and Seattle rain.

My point in that post, however, is valid. The New Yorker and the Reuben are very similar, especially when you add slaw to the former, which serves a very similar counterbalance that the kraut in the Reuben does. The Reuben was generously portioned, as you'd expect from Tat's. The Corned Beef tasted like it has been reheated in bacon grease, the kraut is nice and slightly tangy, the rye is nicely toasted and even under the weight of all that meat, cheese, and sauce, it didn't give up after a 10 minute walk back to work. The guy in the elevator up to my floor had a Jimmy John's sandwich in hand and as the amazing corned beef smell filled our elevator I think I saw him cry a little.

The Reuben also marks a kind of pivotal point in the history of E.A.T.: I've now eaten every sandwich off of the "Hot Subs & Specials" list, which is arguable the heart and soul of the Tat's menu. The Kosher Dog remains, but is not a sandwich, and I have yet to write up the Tat'strami, as I'm saving it for last.

#35 Egg Salad

I did it. One of the three sandwiches I really don't want to eat has been knocked off the to-do list.

Yeah, I like egg salad sandwiches. They are, when made well, great comfort food.

No, I'll never, ever, ever order this again. No. No, no, no.

#34 Twinburger Sub

Look into the face of zen and know the true inner peace that is the Twinburger Sub. 

It's been 54 weeks since I started this blog, and as far as my original intent was to eat all 52 menu items in a calendar year, I have failed. As a white American male I've been taught over and over that when you run into failure, panic, stress, or any other mildly inconvenient emotion or life situation, there is only one way to handle things: eat a lot of food to dull the pain.

One of the menu items I've most anticipated is the Twinburger Sub.  The Tat's menu description reads "Philly Classic... two or three lean patties w/ melted American cheese. LTOM & pickles." Just about every menu item that Tat's has is a variant on something I've eaten somewhere else at some point, except the Twinburger Sub. It's the unholy union of a double cheeseburger and a sub sandwich, and it is beautiful to behold.

Maybe it was that I hadn't gone to Tat's in a while, maybe it was the magical pickles and melty cheese, but eating this was a semi magical experience. I felt like I was in a trance. I am more motivated than ever to go back and finish my E.A.T. experience because all I want is another Twinburger Sub to cram in my pie hole to suppress my feelings of inadequacy and self loathing.

#31/32/33 Chicken Strips, Potato Salad, & Slaw

As soon as I sat down with my tray I thought "this is exactly what a giant fat person like me who doesn't know how to diet would think they could eat healthy at Tat's."

Yeah, it's a 3-fer. I've got some side-dishes to knock off the list and this sounded like a good combination. It leave me in a position to pull a second 3-fer with the Wings, Macaroni Salad, and a House Salad. Then I've still got the Antipasta and Chop Salad, one of which I'll probably get with the Chili Cheese Fries. If I double up and get some Old Bay Fries with the Kosher Dog then that leaves me with a total of 3 breakfast visits and 10 lunch visits before I'm done with the menu. If any friends of the blog want to get in on a joint Tat's offensive, now is your chance. I'm going on a diet of vegetables and porridge after this is done to get back down to my fighting weight.

Chicken Strips: "Regular or Buffalo with ranch, bleu cheese, or bar-b-que sauce." I went Buffalo and there was mild or hot, hence the "hot hw sauce" on the receipt. Got a small side of Slaw and Potato salad.

They say "All salads are made fresh, in-house..." but you wouldn't know it, truth be told. The slaw is the same as on the Tat'strami, looks like it's made from bagged pre-cut cabbage/veggies, and the sauce is kind of a compromise. A little bit of vinegar, a fair amount of sweet. A little creamy. Sort of the slaw you'd make to not offend anybody. It's fine, better than the nasty shit you get at Ivar's or some other fish'n'chips place, but not as good as homemade slaw. The potato salad couldn't differentiate itself from store-bought stuff that comes in 5 gallon buckets any less. Bits of nasty celery, no real potato flavor, just sort of mushy and mayonaisse-y. Not much to say. It didn't give me the shits, so I can't complain too much. Would never order either of them again.

The Chicken Strips are pretty solid. They aren't anything to bring somebody here to eat, and if you've had chicken wings at any dive bar with minimal cockroaches then you know what you're getting here.

None of this is the highlight of the Tat's menu. This is the ancillary stuff. You already make slaw for sandwiches, so put it on the menu as a side. You already make chicken for sandwiches, so put it on the menu minus the bread. This is "move along" stuff and none of you care, and neither do I. Just checking the boxes at this point, waiting on that Twinburger Sub and figuring out how I'm going to choke down the Roast Veggie.

#30 Meatball

Took a late lunch stroll to Tat's once the linecam told me things had emptied out. It started raining on the way so I thought I'd try waiting it out and eating at Tat's in spite of my favorite seat being occupied (yeah, I said it. so what?).

Meatball motherfucker.

"Tat's meatballs and marinara sauce, broiled w/ Mozzarella & Parmesan"

Mozz and Parm, holy shit. So much mozzarella.

Meatballs like god damned Pompeii, buried under ashes and pumice and shit. It's a surefire heart attack wrapped in bread. Really good.

#29 B.L.T.

"Thick-cut crisp Bacon...mmmm bacon" is the Tat's menu description of the BLT. Classic Tat's menu description. Inappropriate capitalization, ellipsis, seemingly drunken internal monologue commentary. If only it had an ampersand it would be the quintessential listing.

I was planning to hit up Tat's on Friday of last week but my friend wanted to mix it up, so we headed to Salumi at just before they open at 11. The line was 50 people deep, a mix of unimaginative yuppies and tourists. Friday is the worst day to get lunch in Pioneer Square. We ended up heading to Delicatus on 1st, which was terribly mediocre and undeserving of the little bit of good feedback I'd heard. A $10 sandwich should not be disappointing. The bar is low. Wish I'd gone to Tat's, so I made it up to myself today.

Following on the bacon-heels of the Bacon, Egg, & Cheese breakfast sandwich, I decided to cross another Hoagie off of my list. Just the Roast Veggie, Tuna, and Egg Salad remain, unsurprisingly. There's a 99% chance the egg salad will be next on the Hoagies and the Tuna Salad will be last.

Good ol' Tat's, putting the B in BLT. This isn't a sandwich I'd order under normal circumstances. I make BLTs under one circumstance: I've got homemade bacon and fresh local tomatoes. None other. Not really my jam. You need killer ingredients, and as I've covered before, Tat's bacon is just fine, grocery store quality stuff. This isn't fine dining, it's a $1 per inch hoagie. And for what it is, god damn it was good.

I spiced mine up with yellow mustard, oil, and vinegar. It was a good choice. The mustard and vinegar helped cut the cold fat of the bacon. I'd have been a lot happier with hot, or even warm bacon. The tomatoes were nice and ripe, and there was a ton of lettuce. I love iceburg lettuce. White people are so fucking corny.

#28 Bacon, Egg, & Cheese

Got in to work this morning and didn't like the looks of the day ahead of me, so I walked back out the door and down the road to Tat's to pick up a breakfast sandwich.

In the morning Tat's is like a beautiful sandwich paradise locked away from the cruel outside world. Where you can have provolone and egg and bacon in a soft, warm roll.

I had to go back to work, but for a few hours I thought back on my Bacon, Egg, & Cheese fondly. Maybe next time I'll pick up two of them and save one for lunch. If I did the Bacon again I'd at least get onions on it, if not peppers.

After a few hours my sandwich bliss wore off and it was back to the grind. Better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all. That's what Oprah says, right?

#27 Pizza Steak

Pizza Steak. It's not a pizza, and it's not a steak. It's the third of four Philly Steaks on the Tat's menu, and I'm about to write on the internet about eating that shit.

The menu says "Broiled with Tat's Marinara sauce & Mozzarella." I'd had a really bad week and needed a serious Tat's pick-me-up. I knew I couldn't do the BLT or Roast Veggie this week, and I was thankful I'd saved a few sandwiches that I was excited about. The Pizza Steak is pretty classic, and I've had them other places in abundance in years gone past. Never had Tat's take on it, though, so this has been one of the 52 I've really wanted to get around to.

I hit Tat's late in the afternoon after a bunch of work meetings. More of The Man trying to keep the white middle class man down in his office dungeon. I escaped briefly and rescued a brown bag full of sandwich to bring back to my cubicle wonderland.

Looks like Pizza and Steak have gotten all Gaza strip on each other in this butcher paper. All cheese and sauce and dripping all over the place. But goddamn does it smell good.

That motherfucker is ugly. Just a wreck. Not like Rachael Leigh Cook in She's All That wearing ugly clothes and glasses and staring at the floor pretending she's not super hot but Freddie Prinze Jr is going to come along and turn her into a beautiful swan ugly, like UGLY. War atrocity ugly. DNR ugly. Community fund for plastic surgery ugly.

I closed my eyes and started digging into it, and before I knew what was going on half of it was gone. Just demolished. Unhealthy fast sandwich consumption. This was the vibe I was hoping for with the sausage sandwich. Sweet marinara, super juicy and soft steak, the whole roll warmed through and soaking in the juices.

Gaze into the maw of deliciousness.

I got onions and peppers, and that was a really good call. It ends up like the sandwich equivalent of a SPO pizza. The only thing I'd recommend is not getting it to go. I think less time to stew in its own juices would do better justice to the inner beauty of this monster.

I have intentionally not rated sandwiches on E.A.T. and I am glad I chose that route. That said, this is a top-5 sandwich so far. It's ain't much to look at, but I'll be damned if it doesn't have a great personality.

#26 Eggplant Parmesan

26 menu items down on my road to eat the whole Tat's menu. Damn. After about ten items on the menu I started getting forgetful about what I had and hadn't eaten, so I printed out a menu and stuck it up on my wall at work. I've been crossing off items as I go.

So technically I'm halfway there, but in reality a lot of what I have on my list are salads and sides. I can knock out about 10 of these in 3 meals. It also means a lot of what I have left are sandwiches I've put off eating because they hold no appeal for me. When life hands you lemons, right?

Who coined that bullshit? What a terrible fucking metaphor. Lemons are awesome. You know what's not awesome? Eggplant. It looks like what happens when you OD on Cialis and have an erection that lasts 24 hours... and it tastes like dirt.

When life hands you eggplant, make eggplant parm.

Yeah, that's the worst joke anyone's ever made on dot blogspot dot com, but the metaphor is apt. Eggplant is shit. Eggplant parm, at least done up Tat's way, is entirely edible.

The eggplant is my friend Lauren's go-to sandwich, because she's veg. I'm not afflicted with that particular moral dilemma, so I'd under no circumstances have ordered this sandwich except to get through E.A.T. even thought she swears it's damned good. And she's half-right, if you've got even an inkling of affection for eggplant then this is all you. Somebody got a little zealous with the broiler on mine and it came out half burnt and with 75% of the cheese stuck to the paper rather than IN the sandwich. C'est la vie, as the Philadelphians say.

The menu says "Lightly fried, topped with Tat's Marinara sauce & broiled w/ Mozzarella & Parmesan cheese." The eggplant is sliced thin, breaded, and fried. You get a stack of these eggplant slices with a bit of the house red sauce, which is mild and sweet. The cheese all blends together, and it could use a lot more parmesan to combat the blandness of the mozzarella, but in spite of that the toasted bread and the sweet sauce play off the eggplant nicely.

At some point I've still got to eat the Roast Veggie, which along with the BLT and the Eggplant are my Tat's trifecta of "don't want to fucking eat it."

Why am I doing this, again?

#24/25 Pepper, Egg, & Cheese with Hash Browns

Back on the breakfast bandwagon, and so happy about it. Tat's is usually super quiet in the mornings, and I understand, because I rarely feel like I have time to sit down and grab some food before work. I met up with my buddy Geoff and we had a killer lunch and were in and out the door in 30 minutes flat, and walked out the door with a giant pile of cheese, bread, and happiness in our bellies.

I started my E.A.T. mission with a breakfast sandwich, the egg and cheese. Since then I've done two more of the eight total breakfast sandwiches, the sausage, egg, and cheese and the ham, egg, and cheese. Knocking out the Pepper, Egg, & Cheese today puts me in a great place: with the Italian-Copa, Steak, and Grinder breakfast sandwiches left to go. Unlike on the lunch front where I'm staring the BLT, Roast Veggie, and House Salad down, breakfast has a lot of appeal left on the finish-the-menu front.

I'm too lazy to open MS Paint, but that shit has heat rays coming off of it. I ordered it with grilled onions, so I got a giant italian roll with fried egg, sauteed green peppers, and covered in a molten layer of provolone. The roll has a nice toast and gets really soft and steamy, ending up with this killer consistently of super warm, soft eggs and peppers with the steamy, pillowy roll and just a bit of toasty crunch on the outside to break it up. It's a killer breakfast sandwich, and for less than $5 you absolutely cannot fuck with the value proposition here.

But that's not the whole story. Geoff ordered the potatoes. The menu calls them has browns, the sign may have called them something else. They are breakfast potatoes. $1.50 and you get a pretty generous portion of them.

The picture accurately captures what's going on here. They weren't inedible, but they were headed in that direction, surfing a wave of soggy grease. Maybe it was a bad batch, I may have to give them another shot later on.

Side Note

For anyone who cares, I've started collecting some of my beer ramblings (and likely other things in the future) at senorhappyburrito.com.

#23 Chicken Salad

And now we begin the trilogy of sandwiches I have feared the most: salad. Tat's has chicken salad, tuna salad, and egg salad sandwiches. "Fresh, light, and delicious... like Mom used to make"

Into the breach we go...

As with all the hoagies, it comes on an "italian" roll with lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, seasoning, and mayo. I opted against adding mustard or oil/vinegar on this.

I've been dreading these sandwiches. Not because I don't like chicken, egg, and tuna salad. I love them. All three. I grew up on tuna and chicken salad and my wife makes a mean egg salad that I will demolish with the reckless abandon that only a fat white guy can muster for something as passé as egg salad.

BUT...

I fucking hate celery. There's no other vegetable that I truly hate (except bean sprouts which are just asian celery) as much as this shit. It's fucking useless. Lots of people tell me this is weird, and maybe I've got some genetic abnormality that makes celery taste and feel differently than it does for others, but I'll be damned if it doesn't taste like bitter dirt and have the most unsettlingly nasty consistency I've ever experienced (and I've eaten nasty stuff like pickled duck tongue and szechuan style pork intestine, which have plenty weird consistency). 

For as much as people claim that celery doesn't taste like anything they sure love to fuck up a perfectly good turkey stuffing or chicken salad with it. So I knew this was coming, and I tried to soldier through. I picked out as much as I could. This sandwich wouldn't have been ordering even if you did like celery, though. It's fine, it's not bad, the chicken is in tiny chunks and is pretty dry in spite of all the mayo. It tastes like it has a bunch of curry powder in it, which isn't how MY mom made it. 

This is the first sandwich that has made me question wanting to do EVERY item on the menu. Not because it was bad, but because I didn't want to eat it and I'm still hungry (which hasn't happened at Tat's before) and I have both egg and tuna salad to look forward to.

#22 Chicken Bacon Ranch

As promised, here's the second part of the crispy chicken series (part 1 was the Crispy Chicken Sub).

This is one of the trashiest sandwiches on the menu. It has no cultural background, hell, no cultural value. The chicken bacon ranch is as at home on the Subway menu as it is at Tat's. It's a sandwich I would never have ordered if I wasn't doing everything on the menu, which makes this one of the interesting ones.

A few years ago I was walking up Yesler on my way to Tat's. There's a Subway just one block down from Tat's, and as I walked up from 1st I saw a guy walk past Tat's and then directly in front of me walk INTO Subway instead. It was 11:25am and there was no line at either place. I stopped and before the door closed behind him yelled "are you fucking serious?" at the guy. He turned as the door closed, a bewildered look on his face. I walked to Tat's and got a Tat'strami, but I could never shake the look of sad childlike bewilderment on that idiot's face.

I'm not saying the Tat's sandwich is a culinary masterpiece, or that it is at all noteworthy. It isn't. It's one of the worst things on the Tat's menu, honestly. It isn't Subway, though, and that's a lot. It's enough that I can now look back on the incident with the idiot and imagine him gorging himself on that nasty mess of a chicken bacon ranch sandwich while I'm stuffing my gut with this:

I apologize for the lack of professional lighting and digital color correction, but please note the lack of any substance resembling radioactive semen on the Tat's sandwich.

Cons of the Tat's CBR:

1. It doesn't have "Asiago" on it ala Wendy's super rebellious and bold bad boy chicken burger:

2. Lacking a "self-rising crust" makes us question how great its value is:

Pros of the Tat's CBR:

1. It's ingredients can legally be called "chicken"

2. America