After Peter Falk and Burgess Meredith, Graham Elliot is now the third-most-celebrated television personality to have inhabited historic Tree Studios. Of course the outspoken Elliot, who plays Good Cop on Gordon Ramsay’s MasterChef (and moonlights as a real chef), doesn’t actually live in an artist’s garret there, feverishly concocting wacky sandwich reinventions and crafting clever Tweets. Nor could a busy celebrity such as he be expected to spend a terrific amount of time in his eponymous sandwich shop. But he has left his unmistakable mark all over the narrow, tightly run ship, from the jaunty tweed tam-o-shanters the young sandwich jockeys wear in place of hairnets to the perfectly useless but oh so ironically nostalgic sporks handed out with the menu’s token mesclun shrubbery.
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That’s for the occasional fan who’ll insist on eating something that requires a utensil. For the rest of us the eight main offerings are quintessentially Elliotesque tweaks on sandwich archetypes—the banh mi, the Reuben, the grilled cheese, etc. All but three are given some sort of pronounced sweet accent, because this is a chef who fully understands that we’re a culture addicted to our own dopamine. That’s why the banh mi, whose organizing principle seems to willfully defy the orderly harmony of the original, contains chunks of roasted pineapple among fat batons of pork belly and wads of creamy daikon slaw on a chewy, overly sturdy baguette that’s no improvement over light, crispy rice-flour Vietnamese bread. A raisin chutney is the candy on a smoked whitefish naanwich, referencing a curried chicken salad with its inclusion of a curry aioli, almonds, and shredded carrots enfolded in a cold, thin flatbread. On the turkey confit it’s candied yams and cranberry relish. A reference to the classic Thanksgiving midnight snack, this is my favorite of the lot—it doesn’t promise anything more than it is, built on a spongy “dinner roll” that compresses at the slightest touch. For a chef who trades so heavily in nostalgia, this is his most effective trigger—I was instantly transported to the cold, fridge-lit suburban kitchen of my parents’ house.
The most structurally sound sandwich among them all is a veggie tofu wrap tightly bundled in a vivid green tortilla. A time capsule dug up from 1972, when something like this could’ve made waves, its only hint of flavor and texture comes from a sprinkling of crunchy wasabi peas.
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