#19 Hot Turkey

I watched the Tat's linecam until things slowed down and then walked over. I can tell already that as soon as the weather warms up it'll be a bit less prohibitive to get there multiple times in a week. The sun was out and the walk through Occidental Mall was beautiful. One of my favorite places in the city.

Tat's was a bit more crowded than I expected from the linecam, but I ordered and squeezed into a bar seat next to a guy with some sweet hand/face/head tattoos whose phone rang 5 times over 15 minutes. Important dude.

Hit my 10 punches and got a free sandwich. Couldn't imagine the day getting much better. Got the Hot Turkey, which the menu describes as "In-House Smoked Turkey dipped in turkey jus w/ Swiss LTOM." I got it club style with bacon, for $1 it's worth it and the nice lady comp'ed it rather than charging me the $1. Not sure what happened to the young lady who used to work every lunch day, she was awesome and talked to me about Napalm Death briefly once. The young lady who has been there the last few times is totally on top of shit, too, not sure how they luck out with such good front of house people.

My sandwich came up and smelled fucking delicious. The roll was toasted just right and had a great flaky on the outside soft on the inside thing going on. There was a lot of lettuce, tomatoes, and onions, and they were fresh. I bit in and almost started cussing out loud. This sandwich was fucking delicious.

I mauled the first half like it had said bad things about my mother. Absolutely demolished it. I ate it so fast I had to stop and make myself take a picture before the second half met the same fate. I thought about getting up and ordering another so I could just keep going to town on hot turkey club after hot turkey club.

Yep, I'm white - like you couldn't have guessed by my terrible first world complaining about really good sandwiches not being perfect. This shot shows the second half kind of crushed under my overanxious grasp. It's a really nice serving of turkey that, when warm and dipped in the jus, just came to life. The seasoning actually fit in really well on this one and the mayo gave it a bit of that post-thanksgiving fresh turkey sandwich vibe. But this is better than that. For fucking serious.

This sandwich is the reason I started this blog, this experiment, in the first place. This is one of the hidden gems that I would NEVER have ordered in a thousand fucking years. Remind me about this sandwich when I'm slogging through the Roast Veggie and the House Salad.

#18 Honey Ham & Cheese

Went back to a cold one because I couldn't remember which sandwiches I'd had and which I'd only had crusty wet dreams about. This is the last thing on the bottom left side of the menu before I get to the shit I don't want to eat, so I knew I hadn't tried it.

The menu says "The standard sub classic with Swiss... try it with hots & sweets" so I did, and added some mustard, oil, and vinegar on top because I'm watching my weight. My buddy, as you can see, knows what he's doing and went straight up Tatstrami, the sandwich of champions.

I don't know what's up with the strange ass way that they put subs together at Tat's. The meat on the outside thing is weird as shit and makes it really hard to get bites with a consistent ratio of meat to bread to fillings. Must be some east coast shit? Don't get it, don't like it, don't want none of it. I mean, I do, but for god's sake put the meat IN the bread already.

Alright, that's what I'm talking about. I can't even imagine this sandwich without the hot and sweet peppers, the oil and vinegar, and the yellow mustard. With all that stuff it's a fucking sandwichgasm in your mouth, all mustard leaking down your cheek and shit. I'd put this up there with the Hoagie Steak on my "want to repeat right away list" and it's all about the condiments pushing it over the top. Ballin'.

#17 Special: ITALIAN ROAST PORK smoked provolone, spicy spinach rabe w/ garlic aoili

The special hooked me. I'm not much for spinach, but roast pork, smoked anything, and garlic and spicy and sandwich. My brain didn't even recognize the "spinach" part lost in the midst of all the other descriptors.

I think they forgot the garlic aioli, but I was immediately so deep in this thing that I didn't even bother to worry about it. The provolone was melted in a generous heap on the top and I adjusted it a bit so I wasn't eating straight up mouthfuls of cheese. The pork was sliced really thin and there was a LOT of it. This sandwich had the portions absolutely dialed in. Could have used some salt, and some of that aioli, but that didn't stop it from being heart attack inducingly tasty. The one real gripe I had was that there was enough water coming from either the pork or the spinach that the second half of the sandwich got soggy within about a minute to the point of turning to mush and falling apart.

I wiped off the slushy dead bread like dirt off a fallen french fry and soldiered on like any really fat man with an unquenchable hunger for sandwiches would. I don't believe in the bible because nowhere in the supposed "ten commandments" do they lay down the six second rule.

Yeah, that's right. Tat's makes spinach taste good. Who the fuck would have thought?

#16 Chicken Parmesan

Trying really hard to get back on the horse. I figured I'd dig in to something I thought had a really good chance of being awesome enough to keep me excited about eating in spite of my ever deteriorating physical condition.

As that fucking retarded ewok Emeril would say "Boom!" or "Bam!" or something.

Chicken Parm, motherfucker. It's like an Italian American shrine to obesity, and as a man with a gut so big he can barely see his dick I felt like this was what I needed to do with myself instead of exercising. The Tat's menu says "Lightly fried, topped with Tat's marinara sauce & broiled with Mozzarella and Parmesan cheese." It's got chicken and tomatoes in it, how unhealthy can it be?

Here's where I've got to really apologize. There's no excuse for this kind of terrible photo in a classy piece of journalism like this. And there's only one sandwich shot. Truth is that I was embarrassed to be taking a picture of my food like some yuppie yelp-review writing fuckwit who'd rather tweet about a sandwich than eat it. Not my style. In the future I'll sacrifice my pride for the task at hand and get better pictures. Of course this looks more like a pizza in a bread bowl than anything else, and if Tat's steals that idea for a lunch special i want a free one.

This is kind of the Cap'n Crunch of lunch sandwiches. It was hot as fuck and after the cheese scalded my tongue the rock hard chunks of fried chicken scraped the roof of my mouth til it bled. Then I proceeded to devour the entire sandwich in a frenzied orgy of blood, meat, cheese, and sauce. If this was some secret attempt at aversion therapy to get me to stop eating like a disgusting pig, it failed.

#15 Ham, Egg, and Cheese

I'm writing about this sandwich two months later. I fell into a metaphorical hole in the earth and during that time I accumulated a backlog of sandwich photos and receipts. Two months later I can clearly recall how a bad morning at work turned into a walk through Pioneer Square to Tat's.

Ham, egg, and cheese. Provolone is really the way to go here. It's got the melty thing going right and a bit of funk so it's not just like factory made mozzarella plastic. Trust me, I'm fat.

That's a picture of the best five dollars and forty eight cents you're going to spend in the 21st century. Here's another one.

#14 Club Sub