Good sandwiches are feats of engineering and economy, which is another way of saying the tomatoes don’t slide out the back end and the tab doesn’t break the bank. Compared with dinners that unspool like novels, the best sandwiches, eaten on the fly, are short stories, swift and smart and telling.
My wife, Blair, remembers a family drive home from the beach, when she was eight and sick with a sinus infection, and the curative power of a corned beef and potato salad sandwich on rye from a long-lost Montgomery, Alabama, deli. I talk about our son at five, and of a debate Blair and I had about whether we would let him play with toy guns, until, on a visit to a New Orleans po’boy shop, Jesse settled the matter by biting his grilled cheese into the shape of a gun and pretending to hold up the owner. That’s another way of saying good sandwiches make good memories.
When I scroll the Instagram feed in my head, these ten pop into focus. Stacked from Arkansas to Florida, in cities and small towns, they deliver smoky pleasures from our past and gesture to our shallot mayo–slathered future.
Lemon Pepper Wet Chicken
How Crispy Express, Atlanta, Georgia
A thesis on dark meat, a dissertation on technique, chicken sandwiches from this two-year-old storefront celebrate Atlanta’s long love affair with fried chicken, from the leg-and-thigh plates once served at Deacon Burton’s in Inman Park to drums and flats from the now-closed LT’s Wings in Cascade Heights to the breast sandwiches of Chick-fil-A. Taking a cue from all, chef and co-owner Will Silbernagel marinates house-butchered thighs in buttermilk, lemon, fresh garlic, and more, and then fries them twice. My favorite gets dunked in a chipotle-spiked Buffalo sauce and served on a pain de mie bun with supercharged ranch, shredded lettuce, sweet pickles, and a sprinkle of lemon-pepper seasoning, the pixie dust of hip-hop ATL.
Pork Banh Mi
East Side Banh Mi, Nashville, Tennessee
When Grace Nguyen and Chad Newton, her husband and business partner, visit her family in Houston, they go hunting for the best banh mi. Sandwiches at this bright counter-service restaurant reflect that exploration and their attempts to go one better. Baked fresh each day, their bread is inspired by a sourdough recipe from the Tartine cookbook and techniques borrowed from traditional Vietnamese baguettes. Slow roasted in a fish-sauce caramel, buckshot with black pepper, the pork they stuff in those baguettes, lined with fried shallot mayo and pickled veggies, tastes like the best barbecue of 2050.
Egg and Olive
Trowbridge’s, Florence, Alabama
Martha Trowbridge introduced sandwiches to this 1918-vintage ice cream parlor when her husband went off to World War II. “She was a smart cookie,” says manager Pam Trowbridge, her granddaughter. Cooks here still stir hard-boiled eggs with mayo, chopped green olives, and one ingredient Pam keeps secret. Sara Lee sandwich white is their bread of choice, toasted on a machine that looks like a trouser press. If you’re lucky, Kira Bullington will be working the kitchen. She rolls on more margarine than most, gaining a deeper brown veneer for these little triangles of nostalgia.
Shoulder Sandwich with Slaw
Helen’s Bar-B-Q, Brownsville, Tennesse
You order through a tight window. Helen Turner, the owner and pitmaster, stands on the other side, a broad smile on her face. Peek through and you can watch her cleaver smoke-blackened pork shoulders into threads. But you don’t see the hardest labor Turner does, tending two fires in a smoke-clogged shed around back. Handed through that portal, her sauce-drenched and slaw-crowned sandwiches speak to the hours she puts in out of sight, and the beauty she coaxes from pigs and wood and time.
Shrimp with Caper Butter
Panino Veloce, Oxford, Mississippi
Baked in a hutch of a restaurant opened in 2023 behind a liquor store, the sourdough focaccia is spongy and pliable, ideal for soaking up the whipped butter and caper spread that bathes the shrimp John Stokes and crew cook in white wine and lemon juice. “We started out trying to do a sort of pickled shrimp sandwich,” he says. “It didn’t work until I remembered my aunt always did this whipped butter with capers for scallops.” Served with Ruffles doused in a riff on the Roman fish sauce colatura, this landlocked sandwich tastes like it began life on the Amalfi coast.
Breakfast in a Sack
Russ Doe’s, Jacksonville, Florida
You could make a case for Jacksonville as the South’s second-best sandwich city after New Orleans. In Louisiana, dockworkers ate muffulettas. Here, workers ate sandwiches tucked in pita baked by Middle Eastern immigrants, helping spawn a distinctive sandwich culture. From a green bungalow in a bend of the St. Johns River, Russ Doe’s still feeds the working folk of Jacksonville. Packed into the tight kitchen, cooks swab barely toasted pita rounds with mayo and fill them with soft scrambled eggs, crisp bacon, and slices of American to make perfect morning takeaways.
Grilled Pimento Cheese and Mortadella
Parker and Otis, Durham, North Carolina
Jennings Brody grew up eating cold Oscar Mayer on white with her grandfather. This is a psychedelic version of that, served from her twenty-first-century general store. She starts with a Duke’s mayo-bound mix of sharp orange cheddar, extra-sharp white cheddar, pimentos, and celery salt on sourdough slices, baked in the Triangle at Weaver Street Market. Thin-sliced mortadella, chunked with pork fat, goes in the middle, along with bread-and-butter pickles from down the road in Mount Olive. A quick turn on a panini press fuses Carolina and Bologna (Italy) for a sandwich both provinces can claim.
Hot Ham and Cheese
Pizza Bar, Carbon Hill, Alabama
Fewer than two thousand people live in Carbon Hill. But each year a hundred thousand hungry patrons step to the counter in this 1970s-era pool hall, owned since 2014 by Catie and Jayson Merchant. They come to gather in graffiti-scrawled booths and talk of cofounder Lacy Allison, who walked the floor with a cigar in his mouth. And they come for hot ham and cheese sandwiches, made with house-baked ham that the cooks here shred, then top with Swiss and mayo inside garlic-buttered loaves of Gambino’s French for a three-napkin indulgence that’s crispy on the outside and gooey in the middle. “We pray over our store,” Jayson says, “and we pray for the people who eat our sandwiches.”
Torta Toluqueña
Tortas Mexico, North Little Rock, Arkansas
Gaspar Vazquez and his wife, Silvia Sanchez, ran a grocery and a gristmill in San Cosme in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala. After immigrating to Little Rock, they opened a torta shop in a strip mall off I-40, with orange block walls and gumball machines by the door. Jordy and Daniel Vazquez, their sons, now offer twenty tortas, including the Toluqueña, inspired by the city of Toluca, where chorizo is revered. Here, that translates as a fried steak cutlet covered with the spicy pork sausage, shingled with avocado and sliced jalapeños, stuffed in a fluffy bolillo, and pressed hard until the ridged crust browns and blisters.
Crispy Catfish
Leon’s Oyster Shop, Charleston, South Carolina
A breading with three-quarters cornmeal and one-quarter flour, seasoned with Old Bay, coats the farm-raised North Carolina fillets. Sesame seeds top the mayo-smeared bun. Inspired by Fishnet Seafood, a roadside joint on the Charleston outskirts (where Leon’s co-owner Brooks Reitz once ate a perfect fish sandwich on the trunk of his car), and by the Elks Lodge fish fries his grandmother hauled him to when he was a boy in Henderson, Kentucky, the sandwich at this neo-roadhouse is an argument for restraint that requires no embellishments, save a quick hit of hot sauce.
Read more in G&G’s Ultimate Guide to Southern Sandwiches here.
For a limited time, you can taste the sandwich Mason Hereford created for the cover of G&G’s August/September issue at The Garden & Gun Club in Atlanta. The sandwich is available August 12–September 16, 2024. Stop by or make reservations here.
Garden & Gun has an affiliate partnership with bookshop.org and may receive a portion of sales when a reader clicks to buy a book.
