#42 Grinder, Egg, and Cheese

Damn. I may have saved the best for last with the Tat's breakfast sandwich list. Grinder, egg, and provolone. I assumed they'd do the hot and sweet peppers that are on the regular grinder, but it's a nicely stripped down meat, cheese, and egg. And it's phenomenal. Super salty without the acidity of the ingredients on the normal Grinder sub, which lends to just being hugely savory, and eminently comforting.

The Tat's breakfast menu has always been the ultimate set of sleepers. The sandwiches are hot, super delicious, huge, and cheap. I've gone on and on about it before. Plus, Tat's is quiet in the mornings.

#40/41 Roast Veggie, Fresh Cut Fries (with chili and cheese)

I've got a few sandwiches to tick that I'd been pretty unexcited about, and I got a bit busy back at the start of 2014 and got sidetracked. Let's be honest, guys. Sometimes life gets in the way of art. If the first 40 posts of Everything At Tat's has taught me anything, it's that with a blogspot dot com domain comes a lot of responsibility. It takes a village to eat a sandwich, and today a few of my friends pushed me back on track. Today we set out to make the world a better place. Today we went out into the world to make art. Life can't get in the way of art. So today we mobbed up, rolled deep down past Occidental and we killed a few red baskets.

Roast veggie. Fuck.

From the menu "Delicious sub with Roasted Peppers, Onions, Mushrooms, Eggplant, Garlic, and Provolone cheese." I dove in headfirst. One voice in my head said that maybe it would be a hidden secret. Maybe it would be the Grinder in veggie form - all hot crisp griddled veggies and melted cheese on a steamy toasted roll with a bunch of cold, crisp veggies?  The other voice said it would be a crunchy cheesy mushroom sandwich. Fear ruled out and I decided to give myself a ray of hope by crossing the fries off of my list as well, and since I figured a roast veggie sandwich was the healthiest thing I'd eaten in about six months I went ahead and made them chili cheese fries.

Straight up, when I got the big ass platter with a Tat's hoagie and chili cheese fries I was fucking stoked. A roll with a whole bunch of sandwich fixings sounded really damned good. The fries were hot and messy and loaded with a nice spoonful of chili and some whiz. I dug in. Enough chili and cheese to make it sloppy, enough crisp fries left to the sides to keep the texture right. The chili was pretty heavy on the beans, which on fries is a bit weird and probably not the direction I'd have gone, but they were solid.

The sandwich. Man, I was watching people around me down Tat'strami after Tat'strami. Cheesesteaks were everywhere. My roll was a bit under toasted, it was pretty cold on the outside. I dug in. Got a mouthful of bread and lettuce. Undeterred, I marched on. The veggies didn't have the moisture or the heat to steam the inside of the bun. There wasn't much cheese. There wasn't much seasoning. Honestly, there wasn't even much veggie. It was mostly onions and mushrooms and the whole thing was pretty gnarly. I went back to the fries and mopped them up. Refocused, I gave the sandwich a second shot. Nothing was right, though. My whole day started falling apart. I wondered what I was doing with my life. I questioned the nature of reality. I considered finding a therapist. I couldn't even finish half of the 8" hoagie.

This was the first time I'd ever been to Tat's and not cleared my plate. I was shook.