Happy 5th Birthday, Sandwich Tribunal!
Early in 2014, my friends Josh, Thom and I started sending brag photos of all the delicious sandwiches we were eating to each other on Twitter. Josh, at the time, was keeping a pretty impressive spreadsheet of sandwiches he’d eaten that year, and Thom and I were also prolific sandwich-eaters. Before long we started using the hashtag #SandwichTribunal for these conversations.
Sometime in mid-August of that year, the Wikipedia List of Sandwiches was brought to my attention again. Perhaps it was on August 20th, prompting me to tweet this:
I’d been aware of the List previously. I’d even had the thought that I’d like to try every sandwich on it. But I had not, until the morning of August 21st, 2014, had the audacity to suggest the following:
Josh and Thom’s replies were essentially this: You’re crazy, but we’re in.
So within a couple of hours, I had registered this domain, created a new WordPress site, thrown together a design (that to be honest, is almost exactly what the site still looks like today), and had the site online. What it lacked was content, so I went to J.P. Graziano for lunch and ordered a special sandwich they had available that August, the burrata and heirloom tomato sub.
Of course, at the time I couldn’t conceive of simply eating a tomato and cheese sandwich, so I added prosciutto and got some hot peppers on the side. That shouldn’t have been necessary though. The burrata cheese was magnificent, soft and lush, and the heirloom tomatoes were ripe but firm, with sweetness and acidity. The sandwich was delicious, and the website was born!
Since then, we’ve covered nearly 180 sandwiches on the list, with contributions not only from myself, Josh, and Thom, but from our other friends Crit, Drew, Brian, Mary, Greg, and Akio, not to mention the food writers who contributed to my post about egg sandwiches. Some other friends have expressed interest in possibly writing for the site some day–Myke, Sarvi, Chris–and may yet find their inspiration. Others are bound to come along as well. All are welcome.
Though these days it’s mostly me eating and writing about all these sandwiches, to me this is and always has been a group blog, and it would never have happened without those who have joined in and contributed along the way; without the other friends of ours and family who have encouraged us and sent us links to all the latest Sandwich News; without the readers who drop in and comment when they like something we’ve written, or let us know when we’ve gotten something wrong; without the Internet, which not only gave us the List but gives us the ability to research some of the more obscure sandwiches on that List. It would definitely never have happened without all these delicious sandwiches. Thank you friends and family, thank you readers, thank you Internet, and thank you sandwiches.
I’ve been eating a lot of sub sandwiches this month, since that is one of our List sandwiches for the month, and J.P. Graziano has featured heavily in my diet the past couple of weeks. That burrata and heirloom tomato sub is back as a special (August is tomato season, after all), at least on weekends, but isn’t available today. Still, there’s a bufala mozzarella Caprese salad on special this month, and Jim Graziano says they’ll make it into a sub for me. He says it’s even better than the burrata. Today I return to the site’s roots, and eat another version of the sandwich that got us started. And so I also must say thank you to everyone at J.P. Graziano, whose door I have darkened many a day along the way.
It’s even better than the burrata.
I like sandwiches.
I like a lot of other things too but sandwiches are pretty great
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