Zeps from Eve's Lunch

A Sandwich A Day: Zep from Eve's Lunch in Norristown, PA - on Serious Eats.

More Philly Sandwich Madness - Navy Yard Dinic's, Porky's Point and Bizini's Seafood Steaks and Hoagies.

The last (for now) in a series of crazy Philadelphia sandwich posts for Serious Eats, we did Hoagies and Cheesesteaks a couple weeks ago and this time it's Roast Pork, Cutlets, and all the rest. You can read the real thing on Serious Eats - this is basically just an excuse to post more pictures.



Starting off with the best - Dinic's in the Navy Yard made some of the most delicious sandwiches of the 40+ places we tried over the last couple of months. Not "the best" as in "I don't know what else to write" or "I'm saying it's better than everything else because it's really obscure" but actually THE BEST.


Hard to compare with John's Roast Pork or Nick's Roast Beef's Pork (also in the article) because the pork we had was pulled rather than sliced. Definitely better than Dinic's in the Reading Terminal and even Porky's Point that I want to be the best because it's so freaking cool.


Speaking of Porky's Point this place is incredible, I first went there last year with the amazing Rose Luardo to shoot some video of us eating pigs ears. The owner / manager was nice enough to hang out and tell us the history of the place, which in the 70's was a regular cheesesteak and roast pork stand in what was then an Italian neighborhood. When the area went Puerto Rican instead of getting bitter and racist they changed the menu.



The Roast Pork on the sandwich is the same they put on the classic PR platter with rice and beans and whatever else. Ask for the sandwich covered in "gravy" which is the slightly spicy red sauce they put on everything. It's terrific.


And seriously try some mofungo and pig's ears too... so good.


Another awesome find was Bizini's. If you read this blog often you're probably aware of my obsession with Fish Hoagies. I've been trying to find some really good ones and Bizini's is up there. Most I've had have been relatively small, flat filets but these were thick, dinner sized portions of perfectly fried, fresh flounder. Insane. If we do another one of these slideshows I'd love to do all fish hoagies.





Read more on Serious Eats.
Philadelphia: Roast Pork, Cutlets, Meatballs and More Sandwiches You Should Eat

Drawing And Food

Serious Eats asked me to draw something up for their reusable Baggu shopping bags. You can win one if you go over to their facebook page and tell them what you made for dinner. I'm pretty sure they will also be available for sale in the near future.

• more here

Wawa Challenge

Serious Eats asked me to sample a mess of Wawa breakfast sandwiches for this recent article rating the country's best fast food breakfast sandwiches. They crowned White Castle's breakfast sliders (made with real, fresh eggs!) as the king, but Wawa's Ciabatta Melt received an honorable mention.

Here's some of the other sandwiches we tried. Overall the ones made at the sandwich counter (Ciabatta Melts, and the Philly Steak Egg and Cheese Hoagie) were far better than the heat lamp baked "Sizzli's".


• Junior Ciabatta Melt
The mini version of Wawa's Ciabatta Melt, pretty affordable at only $2.89. I wanted to try one without meat to really taste the quality of the eggs. They look and taste like real scrambled eggs, and they aren't microwaved, instead they are frozen and "rethermalized". However they do it, much better than those scary discs you get at Dunkin Donuts, or even on Wawa's own Sizzli's.The Ciabatta rolls are great, and they really overstuff these suckers.

The best part is, because it's Wawa, you can add ANYTHING on to your breakfast sandwich. Tomato, turkey, ranch dressing, whatever they've got. There's even a button, when creating your sandwich on the computer, to "add italian hoagie" to your egg and cheese. Sounds like an adventure. I didnt have the balls to try it.


• Pork Roll Egg and Cheese Sizzli
My Jersey-born girlfriend took the first bite. I asked her what kind of cheese it was. "American, of course! What did you think it was going to be, Gruyere?" As if anyone would have the audacity to put anything other than American cheese (or Wiz) on a slice of pork roll.

Other than that, a pretty lame sandwich. The bagel was tiny and pretty dry, probably from sitting under the heat lamps for 6 hours. And the scary egg disc was no comparison to the delicious, fluffy "rethermalized" eggs of the Ciabatta.



• Sausage Egg and Cheese Pancake Sizzli
Ripoff of Mcdonald's Mcgriddle but not as good. Nice packaging though, and much better than those scary microwavable shrink wrapped sandwiches that you would get at a 7-11 or a gas station.

The state of Wawa inside the city of Philadelphia is kind of scary. It looks like there's only 6 left. There used to be one on every corner. And the quality here is always a crap shoot. I used to eat Wawa hoagies all the time - only thing open at 2am after work - and never understood why anyone in Philadelphia (with real Hoagies around every corner) would ever eat them unless they had to. Stale bread, totally unbalanced sandwiches with hardly any meat and too many vegetables, or more cheese than meat, or so many pickles that the whole sandwich dripped in pickle juice.

But if you go to the Suburbs or Jersey, Wawas are like palaces. The size of a grocery store, with 8 registers and people lined up 10 deep for sandwiches.

Read More-
Serious Eats - Taste Test: The Best Fast Food Breakfast Sandwiches

Russian Pirate Coney Island

Jake & Caroline took me to this amazing Russian pirate ship themed restaurant in Brighton Beach, right at the edge of what's left of Coney Island. Giant beers, smoked fish, fried potatoes with dill. Read the full report on Serious Eats New York.



Gambrinus Seafood Cafe
3100 Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn NY

WING BOWL XVIII

The Wing Bowl has almost nothing to do with wings. Although winner Super Squibb ate 238 of them, only 3 away from the wing bowl record.

Snooki got booed, a guy in a thong was pelted with full cans of beer, strippers groped each other while middle aged men rubbed their guts against the glass.

Read my full report on Serious Eats.

Hot Dog Of The Week- 24th & Passyunk

Down on Passyunk Avenue west, between 23rd and 24th streets, right in front of the Dunkin' Donuts this guy sells probably the best hot dogs in Philadelphia. Actually the thing to get is the hot sausage on Jersey's finest Del Buono Bakery long roll. He's got all kinds of toppings but go for the homemade pepper hash.

Get there early - he's probably gone by 5pm, weekdays only, and the line gets long. This is for a reason.. He's been there maybe 10 years cranking out good dogs. There's also supposedly a Carribean food truck down there but I didn't see it. There was another cart with fish sandwiches and fish cakes and a guy selling bootleg T-shirts in a vacant parking lot.




Found some old (1913) recipes for Pepper Hash via Google Books. It really started as more of a pickling process. I always thought it was exclusively Pennsylvania Dutch (German) because my grandmother made it, and the PA dutch certainly made it but it wasn't exclusive to their cooking. But it seemed to hit its height of popularity in the Philadelphia area served with fish dishes and eventually hot dogs.

Anyway you can read the whole article on Serious Eats.

Skyline Chili

My friend Tim just brought back some Skyline Chili in a can from Ohio.
Cooked it up with some spaghetti, shredded cheese and raw onions in the real deal Cincinnati style. Apparently you're supposed to eat it with oyster crackers but I was all out. How something popular in New England made it onto Ohio chili blows my mind.

Anyway the taste is kind of insane but really good. It was similar in flavor to the "Greek Sauce" I've had at Texas Weiner style hot dog joints in PA and New Jersey, but much stronger. It's really hard to tell what's in there but I would guess cloves, cinnamon, maybe even chocolate? This kind of Chili has nothing to do with mexico but it sort of reminds me of mole sauce. I always thought chili on spaghetti sounded disgusting but guess what it's great.

Washed it down with some Philadelphia Brewing Company Coffee Porter.. talk about pairing food with beer. I still have 2 cans of chili left, next step is putting that stuff on some hot dogs.


Perfect timing because I just featured the Detroit Coney for Hot Dog Of The Week, which uses a very similar chili traditionally made with beef hearts & kidneys but almost never served with cheese.

Depression Dog

Latest Hot Dog Of The Week on Serious Eats. The Depression Dog is a minimalist Chicago-style dog that's piled high with french fries, almost like a North Jersey- style Italian hot dog, and served in overstock mcdonald's bags at awesome out-of the way hot dog joints with bullet holes in the signs.


Check out Titus Ruscetti's blog for more on Depression Dogs: chibbqking.blogspot.com


I haven't been posting all of my hot dog of the week illustrations here so if you missed any be sure to check them out. Last week I did the NYC Papaya Dog, and before that Hawaii's Puka Dog, and the West Virginia Slaw Dog.

Dirty Frank's Hot Dog Palace

A new addition to the "why the hell isn't there one of these here" department.

Thom Lessner -of awesome paintings & sweatheart fame- designed a killer logo for his sister's new hot dog restaurant in Colombus, Ohio that's filled with his paintings and serves all kinds of hot dogs jammed full of bacon and pulled pork. They also have a full bar stocked with Ohio, Pennsylvania & New York beers as well as root beer floats made with Frotsop root beer from Springfield, Ohio.



This is totally the kind of place I dream about every day... Old school and modern at the same time, everything house made with fresh ingredients, and a big heap of respect for the history of hot dogs and diner style food.

They also seem to have found the perfect balance of over the top greasy delicious food and healthier stuff, including vegetarian versions of all their dogs.

If someone dropped one of these in Philadelphia it would blow all those half-assed faux-retro restaurants out of the water.

Read more at Serious Eats
Check out their site & menu at Dirtyfrankscolombus.com

Photos courtesy of Harold LaRue and Jen Killius

Texas Weiners

Texas Weiners have nothing to do with Texas and everything to do with New Jersey.

In fact that "chili" you've been eating all these years - especially if you live on the eastern half of the united states - is actually a variation on Greek Bolognese sauce.

Read more at Serious Eats...
And watch this awesome Texas Weiner commercial-

Tijuana dog

Latest hot dog painting & post over at Serious Eats. If you missed last week I did a post about Flo's in Maine, and crowned it the country's best hot dog which got a bunch of people angry.

Mexican hot dogs are really, really good and I haven't seen them anywhere in Philly other than SPTR. There's gotta be someone cranking them out of a tacqueria somewhere, or at least there should be.

In Los Angeles they've been shutting down and arresting mexican hot dog vendors, even putting them in jail, because apparently cooking the dog with raw bacon wrapped around it (the bacon gets fully cooked with the dog on the grill) violates health code. Sounds more to me like an excuse to round up mexicans. Watch this video about the controversy featuring Drew Carey.

Fish Cake Combo

My first in a series of hot dog of the week illustrated articles for Serious Eats. The holy grail of Philadelphia cuisine, the Fish Cake Combo. Read more at seriouseats.com.

pantry raid bowl noodle

So Caroline gave me an assignment for her Cook and Tell article on Serious Eats. The idea was to make something spectacular using only the ingredients in your house, no cheating, no shopping allowed.

You might think a food blogging ex line cook would have an amazing kitchen stocked to the gills with food, but really it's just a totally random mess of strange things I bought at the asian market 6 months ago , a few sketchy vegetables and whatever is left over from saturday morning breakfast.

I threw on an "asian-y" broth with a hunk of salt pork and some chicken innards I found in the back of my freezer, along with a few of the sketchy carrots & onions, soy sauce and coriander, and some green onion & cilantro remnants.

Cooked the broth for an hour, strained out the stuff, dropped in a few dumplings I found in the freezer along with a block of rice noodles for 5 minutes. Cooked off some sausage (italian turkey sausage to be exact- this is where the fusion comes in folks) with onions & red peppers. poached an egg, battered it with flour / egg wash / panko and fried it up. threw everything in a bowl with some chili sauce and cilantro and some pickled leeks that I bought a year ago because the can looked cool.

It was actually pretty damn good.. panko crusting the egg was sort of unnecessary and a little bit weird texturally with the noodles and broth.. if I wasn't taking pictures i would have just fried it normally.

I was also contemplating dusting banana slices in vanilla pudding mix and almonds and deep-frying them, mixing some ancient frosting with molasses or something and plating it up real obnoxious-like.. but I just ate the banana instead.

If you want to join in the fun you can follow Caroline's articles over at Seriouseats.com