#43 Tat's Tuna Melt (special)

I've been busy wasting my time with things not as important as eating at Tat's, but a gentle nudge from some friends and I am resuscitating the last few items. Heading in with the intent of finally doing the Tuna Salad, I was instead faced with a daily special I'd never seen - Tat's Tuna Melt.

Fuck it, let's get back into it. Could hot tuna salad be worse than the ring sting of abject failure at eating through the whole menu? Worst case I try to make it to the door when I feel an irresistible urge to vomit and don't make it to the door. Then I'm what, just another Pioneer Square hobo, just another SigEp C# bro who can't hold his Zima? I want to barf every time I log on to blogspot.com, much less pull my phone out to take a picture of my food in public, so I think I can step up and handle 8" of steaming cheesy fish and mayonnaise.

You can't dream up enough pixels to capture how much tuna was on this sandwich. It was unquestionably too much tuna. That said, it was also loaded with shredded lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and pickles. The classic Tat's contrast of hot and steaming with cold and crisp is unassailable, like taking a dump outside on a wintry evening. The cheese and chipotle mayo and hot tuna all just sort of melded together into a big, soft, wet mess. The bread held up to it like a champ and the sandwich never got soggy, but this sandwich certainly had a shelf life of about 5-10 minute before it went from fantastic to falling apart.

There's a little cross-section to cap it off, and yet again it fails to capture the volume of tuna.

#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.

#40 Steak, Egg, & Cheese

$5. Seriously, it blows my mind every time I go get a breakfast sandwich at Tat's. Such a phenomenally good way to spend five bucks. I've only got a handful of sandwiches left, and two of them were breakfast sandwiches.

I did mine with provolone. Should have asked if I could add onions and peppers. In retrospect, major slip up on my part. If you've had Tat's cheesesteak and you've had a breakfast sandwich you can imagine what's going on here. Steak, cheese, egg, roll.

It's not fancy. It's just good. And there's only one photo because I was too busy eating it to bother with more than the bare minimum of photographic evidence. Next time I'm going to see if they'll fry the egg medium so there's a bit of yolk in there, I think it would make everything about this sandwich better. And onions and peppers... really regretting that one.

#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.