The grilled cheese sandwich yet is another Lazy Chef Vegetarian Menu
Staple that gets on my nerves. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good
grilled cheese like nobody’s business, but I tend to resent their
presence as (usually) the standby meatless option, and I get annoyed at
the lack of vision that goes into their creation.
They’re everywhere, you know. Once, I tried to go a week with out eating a grilled cheese, but I came to realize that they are everywhere.
Pervasive (and boring) as fuck! If you think about it, cheese pizza,
caprese sammiches, cheesy garlic bread, Welsh rarebit – it’s all a
grilled cheese. Hell, I can and will even argue that lasagna is
basically a multi-level melted cheese sandwich with tomatoes.
I didn’t make it the whole week. It was a quesadilla that did me in,
and that’s basically a grilled cheese with salsa and beans. I work
downtown and have the usual downtowny uninspired food courts and chain
restaurants to choose from. (No, most days I do not pack a lunch; I need
to leave my office building and get fresh air and the quest for
sustenance is really the only way I can accomplish that.) Even with all
the options available, I still had to work to dodge crepes with brie and
paneer naan and one day I just caved -- the weather was crap and Taco del Mar was right there -- and the rest is history. I'd only made it five days.
So restaurants, if you’ve gonna insist on foisting that on me, at
least make it interesting, please! God invented things like apples,
beer-soaked raisins, roasted beets, fig jam, and bananas especially, specifically
to be put in sandwiches. And protip: there are things other than
Velveeta that melt - bleu cheese, pepper jack, chevre, and gouda all get
all gooey. Peanut butter aint cheese, but that melts too; pop some in
there!
Bread! Also! Too! In addition… the holdy-onny part of the
sandwich need not be butter-soaked Wonder Bread; in fact, it’s best if
it’s not. Rye bread, sourdough, brioche, heck even cinnamon swirl bread
makes for a nice sandwich. Pita bread grills up nicely, as does spinach
naan. Using pumpkin or zucchini bread may take a delicate hand, but
why not give it a go? Wanna make a grilled cheese all Luther Burger
style by tossing some cheddar between a couple of Krispy Kremes? Go
right ahead! Add some dipping sauce, too. The Dutch eat their “tosti”
with all kinds of tasty things – honey mustard sauce, flavored
mayonnaises, chutneys of unknown origin. What do we have, ketchup and
ranch dressing? Yawn.
I think the biggest mistake restaurants make though - aside from
unoriginality - is that they seem to try to cram as much cheese into
their sandwich as possible. Perhaps they think that what’s lacking in
creativity, they can make up for in goop. Which is great for the $4
Kraft-Singles-on-white-bread kid’s menu offering at Red Robin, but if
I’m ordering a nice meal from the grownup menu I do not want
butter/grease/cheese oil soaking through my bread. It makes for an
aesthetically unpleasing sandwich, for sure, but really I just don’t
want the reminder that the thing I’m eating is causing my arteries to
harden faster than a 15-year old’s boner.
It's not all gloom and doom and fail, though. The sandwich situation
seems dire, but there's really quite an easy fix. I propose the
following - sandwich choices based on the cheese pizza model. Sandwiches
are made to order anyway, so why not list the breads available, jot
down all the cheese options, and maybe let me have a bit of vegetable in
there too? There. I fixed it. Problem solved. No more
complaining. I’ll take mine with a crusty-but-chewy rosemary bread,
garlic mayo, thinly-sliced roasted butternut squash, and some
Jarlesberg, please.
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