#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.