#31/32/33 Chicken Strips, Potato Salad, & Slaw

As soon as I sat down with my tray I thought "this is exactly what a giant fat person like me who doesn't know how to diet would think they could eat healthy at Tat's."

Yeah, it's a 3-fer. I've got some side-dishes to knock off the list and this sounded like a good combination. It leave me in a position to pull a second 3-fer with the Wings, Macaroni Salad, and a House Salad. Then I've still got the Antipasta and Chop Salad, one of which I'll probably get with the Chili Cheese Fries. If I double up and get some Old Bay Fries with the Kosher Dog then that leaves me with a total of 3 breakfast visits and 10 lunch visits before I'm done with the menu. If any friends of the blog want to get in on a joint Tat's offensive, now is your chance. I'm going on a diet of vegetables and porridge after this is done to get back down to my fighting weight.

Chicken Strips: "Regular or Buffalo with ranch, bleu cheese, or bar-b-que sauce." I went Buffalo and there was mild or hot, hence the "hot hw sauce" on the receipt. Got a small side of Slaw and Potato salad.

They say "All salads are made fresh, in-house..." but you wouldn't know it, truth be told. The slaw is the same as on the Tat'strami, looks like it's made from bagged pre-cut cabbage/veggies, and the sauce is kind of a compromise. A little bit of vinegar, a fair amount of sweet. A little creamy. Sort of the slaw you'd make to not offend anybody. It's fine, better than the nasty shit you get at Ivar's or some other fish'n'chips place, but not as good as homemade slaw. The potato salad couldn't differentiate itself from store-bought stuff that comes in 5 gallon buckets any less. Bits of nasty celery, no real potato flavor, just sort of mushy and mayonaisse-y. Not much to say. It didn't give me the shits, so I can't complain too much. Would never order either of them again.

The Chicken Strips are pretty solid. They aren't anything to bring somebody here to eat, and if you've had chicken wings at any dive bar with minimal cockroaches then you know what you're getting here.

None of this is the highlight of the Tat's menu. This is the ancillary stuff. You already make slaw for sandwiches, so put it on the menu as a side. You already make chicken for sandwiches, so put it on the menu minus the bread. This is "move along" stuff and none of you care, and neither do I. Just checking the boxes at this point, waiting on that Twinburger Sub and figuring out how I'm going to choke down the Roast Veggie.

#30 Meatball

Took a late lunch stroll to Tat's once the linecam told me things had emptied out. It started raining on the way so I thought I'd try waiting it out and eating at Tat's in spite of my favorite seat being occupied (yeah, I said it. so what?).

Meatball motherfucker.

"Tat's meatballs and marinara sauce, broiled w/ Mozzarella & Parmesan"

Mozz and Parm, holy shit. So much mozzarella.

Meatballs like god damned Pompeii, buried under ashes and pumice and shit. It's a surefire heart attack wrapped in bread. Really good.

#29 B.L.T.

"Thick-cut crisp Bacon...mmmm bacon" is the Tat's menu description of the BLT. Classic Tat's menu description. Inappropriate capitalization, ellipsis, seemingly drunken internal monologue commentary. If only it had an ampersand it would be the quintessential listing.

I was planning to hit up Tat's on Friday of last week but my friend wanted to mix it up, so we headed to Salumi at just before they open at 11. The line was 50 people deep, a mix of unimaginative yuppies and tourists. Friday is the worst day to get lunch in Pioneer Square. We ended up heading to Delicatus on 1st, which was terribly mediocre and undeserving of the little bit of good feedback I'd heard. A $10 sandwich should not be disappointing. The bar is low. Wish I'd gone to Tat's, so I made it up to myself today.

Following on the bacon-heels of the Bacon, Egg, & Cheese breakfast sandwich, I decided to cross another Hoagie off of my list. Just the Roast Veggie, Tuna, and Egg Salad remain, unsurprisingly. There's a 99% chance the egg salad will be next on the Hoagies and the Tuna Salad will be last.

Good ol' Tat's, putting the B in BLT. This isn't a sandwich I'd order under normal circumstances. I make BLTs under one circumstance: I've got homemade bacon and fresh local tomatoes. None other. Not really my jam. You need killer ingredients, and as I've covered before, Tat's bacon is just fine, grocery store quality stuff. This isn't fine dining, it's a $1 per inch hoagie. And for what it is, god damn it was good.

I spiced mine up with yellow mustard, oil, and vinegar. It was a good choice. The mustard and vinegar helped cut the cold fat of the bacon. I'd have been a lot happier with hot, or even warm bacon. The tomatoes were nice and ripe, and there was a ton of lettuce. I love iceburg lettuce. White people are so fucking corny.

#28 Bacon, Egg, & Cheese

Got in to work this morning and didn't like the looks of the day ahead of me, so I walked back out the door and down the road to Tat's to pick up a breakfast sandwich.

In the morning Tat's is like a beautiful sandwich paradise locked away from the cruel outside world. Where you can have provolone and egg and bacon in a soft, warm roll.

I had to go back to work, but for a few hours I thought back on my Bacon, Egg, & Cheese fondly. Maybe next time I'll pick up two of them and save one for lunch. If I did the Bacon again I'd at least get onions on it, if not peppers.

After a few hours my sandwich bliss wore off and it was back to the grind. Better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all. That's what Oprah says, right?

#27 Pizza Steak

Pizza Steak. It's not a pizza, and it's not a steak. It's the third of four Philly Steaks on the Tat's menu, and I'm about to write on the internet about eating that shit.

The menu says "Broiled with Tat's Marinara sauce & Mozzarella." I'd had a really bad week and needed a serious Tat's pick-me-up. I knew I couldn't do the BLT or Roast Veggie this week, and I was thankful I'd saved a few sandwiches that I was excited about. The Pizza Steak is pretty classic, and I've had them other places in abundance in years gone past. Never had Tat's take on it, though, so this has been one of the 52 I've really wanted to get around to.

I hit Tat's late in the afternoon after a bunch of work meetings. More of The Man trying to keep the white middle class man down in his office dungeon. I escaped briefly and rescued a brown bag full of sandwich to bring back to my cubicle wonderland.

Looks like Pizza and Steak have gotten all Gaza strip on each other in this butcher paper. All cheese and sauce and dripping all over the place. But goddamn does it smell good.

That motherfucker is ugly. Just a wreck. Not like Rachael Leigh Cook in She's All That wearing ugly clothes and glasses and staring at the floor pretending she's not super hot but Freddie Prinze Jr is going to come along and turn her into a beautiful swan ugly, like UGLY. War atrocity ugly. DNR ugly. Community fund for plastic surgery ugly.

I closed my eyes and started digging into it, and before I knew what was going on half of it was gone. Just demolished. Unhealthy fast sandwich consumption. This was the vibe I was hoping for with the sausage sandwich. Sweet marinara, super juicy and soft steak, the whole roll warmed through and soaking in the juices.

Gaze into the maw of deliciousness.

I got onions and peppers, and that was a really good call. It ends up like the sandwich equivalent of a SPO pizza. The only thing I'd recommend is not getting it to go. I think less time to stew in its own juices would do better justice to the inner beauty of this monster.

I have intentionally not rated sandwiches on E.A.T. and I am glad I chose that route. That said, this is a top-5 sandwich so far. It's ain't much to look at, but I'll be damned if it doesn't have a great personality.

#26 Eggplant Parmesan

26 menu items down on my road to eat the whole Tat's menu. Damn. After about ten items on the menu I started getting forgetful about what I had and hadn't eaten, so I printed out a menu and stuck it up on my wall at work. I've been crossing off items as I go.

So technically I'm halfway there, but in reality a lot of what I have on my list are salads and sides. I can knock out about 10 of these in 3 meals. It also means a lot of what I have left are sandwiches I've put off eating because they hold no appeal for me. When life hands you lemons, right?

Who coined that bullshit? What a terrible fucking metaphor. Lemons are awesome. You know what's not awesome? Eggplant. It looks like what happens when you OD on Cialis and have an erection that lasts 24 hours... and it tastes like dirt.

When life hands you eggplant, make eggplant parm.

Yeah, that's the worst joke anyone's ever made on dot blogspot dot com, but the metaphor is apt. Eggplant is shit. Eggplant parm, at least done up Tat's way, is entirely edible.

The eggplant is my friend Lauren's go-to sandwich, because she's veg. I'm not afflicted with that particular moral dilemma, so I'd under no circumstances have ordered this sandwich except to get through E.A.T. even thought she swears it's damned good. And she's half-right, if you've got even an inkling of affection for eggplant then this is all you. Somebody got a little zealous with the broiler on mine and it came out half burnt and with 75% of the cheese stuck to the paper rather than IN the sandwich. C'est la vie, as the Philadelphians say.

The menu says "Lightly fried, topped with Tat's Marinara sauce & broiled w/ Mozzarella & Parmesan cheese." The eggplant is sliced thin, breaded, and fried. You get a stack of these eggplant slices with a bit of the house red sauce, which is mild and sweet. The cheese all blends together, and it could use a lot more parmesan to combat the blandness of the mozzarella, but in spite of that the toasted bread and the sweet sauce play off the eggplant nicely.

At some point I've still got to eat the Roast Veggie, which along with the BLT and the Eggplant are my Tat's trifecta of "don't want to fucking eat it."

Why am I doing this, again?

#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.