All Hail The Minimalist Sandwich
Esquire Singapore|Summer 2021
Fried prosciutto instead of bacon? Crunchy sourdough in lieu of white bread? Leave that to the pros. At home, it’s time to rediscover the sublime joys of the kind of sandwich you ate as a kid.
Jeff Gordinier
All Hail The Minimalist Sandwich
A sandwich used to be a simple thing.

The sandwiches you carried to school in a lunch box, the sandwiches you wolfed down after school in front of the TV— they were never meant to be examples of extravagance or creative disruption. Three or four ingredients did the trick. Bread, ham, cheese, mustard. Bread, turkey, cheese, mayonnaise. Bread, jelly, peanut butter. Overstuffing them ruined them.

Think of a sandwich prized for its thinness, a sandwich made with one slice of meat and one slice of cheese, a sandwich so compact and slim that it can be consumed easily with one hand while the other hand steers a bicycle. We have, in the past decade or so, moved in a different direction from that.

‘Reinvent everything’ has been the mantra among restaurant chefs, and while their quest to shake up the core tenets of lunch has led to plenty of intriguing and delicious breakthroughs, from Parm in New York City to Palm City in San Francisco, chefs (being chefs) find it difficult to resist the temptations of excess. I have encountered sandwiches that have filled me up after four bites; I have ordered sandwiches that, to put it bluntly, did not fit into my mouth.

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