Philip Ghantous’s Cuban sandwich is an expertly proportioned construction of light, cracker-crisp Gonella bread, mustard, pickle, baby Swiss, ham, and mojo-marinated roasted pork shoulder. That may sound like a simple thing—unless you’ve withstood the carping of people who know southern Florida about bread as dense as a baseball bat, cheap processed meats, mustard-to-cheese ratios, and cubanos too overstuffed to allow for the properly hot, gooey integration of those ingredients.
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Ghantous’s naranja agria mojo—sour orange with lime and lemon juice, cumin, garlic, oregano, salt, and pepper—is just one of the things that make his sandwiches singular. (And not just the Cuban: he uses a version of the mojo that calls for fewer onions to marinate the beef round that goes on his palomilla, a couple breakfast sandwiches, and a chimichurri-dressed sandwich.) His pork shoulders marinate for three days before they’re roasted. “Then I slice it, and that’s when my employees really hate me,” he says—his meticulousness extends to precisely apportioning slices for individual servings. Then when someone orders a cubano or the lechon sandwich, he throws one of the slices on the grill and hits it with another shot of “the gold” before laying it on the bread with the other ingredients. The lechon sandwich drips with the stuff.
“I used to always tell my family, out of all the places in the world, all the beautiful places, why Peoria, Illinois? I was the first one to leave.” In ’95 he escaped to Chicago to study drama at Columbia College, and after graduation he waited tables to support himself while he appeared in a succession of off-Loop shows. By 2001, however, a desire to be in a position to support a family led him into a series of marketing gigs and jobs in corporate sales. After five years of that, he was desperate to find something that would allow him to act again. “My wife’s never seen me in a show,” he says. He bought into a Portage Park pool hall with his brothers-in-law, and they put in a grill offering bar food like burgers and hot wings. But the 15-hour days didn’t give him a lot of time to make auditions: “I’d be there until two, three in the morning watching people play pool and saying, ‘There’s gotta be something else. There’s gotta be something else,’” he says.
So if a Cuban sandwich can accommodate Italian, South American, Mexican, and Caribbean influences, what about Lebanese?
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