#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

#13 Hot Beef

Lucky number 13, a quarter of the way through the Tat's menu.  It's troubling, but my last few sandwiches at Tat's have been particularly unsatisfying. I was desperate for a return to normalcy, and my buddy Ethan wanted to grab lunch, so I headed in the direction of one of the sandwiches I had hoped would be a secret superstar: Hot Beef.

As a kid my grandfather would take me to an old-school cafeteria in San Francisco. It was down a long flight of stairs into a daylight basement with 20 foot tall ceilings, and full of old men having long retirement lifestyle lunches. My grandfather and I both religiously ate the hot beef sandwich - piles of prime rib carved thin by hand to order and piled onto an Italian roll and served with a side of jus.

Tat's menu says "Our own Roast Beef in au Jus w/ Provolone, horseradish, and hot peppers. Injected with fries..mmmmm..no charge"  The dude at the counter mentioned cutting the horseradish with mayo, so I said "yes" and of course injected it with fries.

This isn't my grandpa's hot beef, and much to my chagrin there's nothing in Seattle that remotely resembles that amazing cafeteria.  In spite of the high bar set by my nostalgia, the Tat's Hot Beef is a hell of a sandwich.  You can tell from the moment you see the pile of fries soaked in freshly melted provolone that it's going to make your day, and the rest doesn't disappoint.  This time the beef was plentiful, and the fries add a really great contrasting texture.  The jus is good and the roll was crisp and nicely toasted in parts from the broiler.

If you want to try something new off the Tat's menu this is the direction I'd point in. Next time I'll get it without the mayo and with extra horseradish, and there is definitely going to be a "next time" with this sandwich. We're going to become very, very good friends.

#12 In-house Roast Beef

Cold roast beef is one of my favorite sandwiches. It was my childhood go-to and back in the '80s there was a deli in a stripmall in Vallejo that roasted their own beef and had some amazing sourdough which instilled in me a love of sandwiches that has served me well until this day.

Tat's ain't that place, sadly. On the list of hits and misses this kind of falls in the middle, but it definitely isn't worth ordering again.  I hate to see my love letter to Tat's turn into a "what to avoid list" but the last thing I'm going to do is blow hot up air up the internet's ass over some mediocre sandwich.

There's not much more to this than the Turkey.  I didn't learn my lesson and forgot to leave out the "seasonings" and the chopped onion. Those don't make or break this though, and at the heart the problem is that their house roast beef isn't great. The insult to injury is that they are very, very skimpy with it. You can see that there's barely the better part of two slices of beef on the sandwich.



Now I'm going to have to go find a good roast beef sandwich to wash away the disappointment.

#11 Sausage

That was ten days ago.

So was that.

I took me ten days to finally write this simply because I had high hopes for this sandwich and it was a fucking mess. Not that it was all that bad, but it was a serious disappointment. The sausage was a bit dry and hard, it was cut into chunks that were far from bite sized, and the whole thing was almost immediately a soggy mess.  I ended up pulling out my pocket knife to cut up the sausage and had to wrap the second half to keep it from falling apart.  This whole thing is about how awesome Tat's is, but in this case Tat's was far from awesome and that's not a lot of fun to write about.