#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