Making the Case for New Orleans as America’s Sandwich Capital

On the one hand, it is silly to argue about which city is America’s sandwich capital. Like debates around other regional specialties—say, pizza or hot dogs—sandwich disputes end up offering more proof of how deeply these foods are stitched into our common foodways than they do of differences in how we enjoy them. I’ve learned that the correct question when I visit a new American city isn’t “Is there a famous local sandwich?” but “Where can I find it?” I dream of sandwiches and I bet you do, too, wherever you may call home.

On the other hand: C’mon.

You could argue that New Orleans rises to the top on the strength of a single sandwich. No city obsesses over and identifies more with one sandwich than New Orleans does the po’boy. (The possible exception is Philadelphia, and frankly the cheesesteak is only that city’s third-best sandwich, after the Italian hoagie and roast pork with broccoli rabe.) Breadheads, the kind who nurse their sourdough starters with the tenderness of young parents and speak in a language of gluten strands and hydration, may sniff at the “French” loaves that distinguish the po’boy—puffy, pale, perhaps a touch bland—but they represent the sublimity of form meeting function: light enough to crackle under the teeth and sturdy enough to hold their own against the assault of hot ingredients. Ask a New Orleanian to name the best po’boy shop and you’ll get as many as five different answers, one for each of the canonical po’boys: shrimp, oyster, catfish, roast beef, and hot sausage. My own answers are, in order: Liuzza’s by the Track, Domilise’s, Zimmer’s Seafood, R&O’s, and, well, hold that thought. We’ll circle back to hot sausage.

Photo: CEDRIC ANGELES

A shrimp po’boy from Liuzza’s by the Track.

In some ways, though, the po’boy’s high profile has held New Orleans back. This is the Po’boy Paradox: Sometimes a place has such a strong food culture that it’s hard for new traditions to get attention. I’m here to argue that right now we have entered a Golden Age of New Orleans Sandwiches: that a scene traditionally dominated by its most famous creation has grown into a diverse, exciting, delicious sandwich ecosystem. That what’s always been a town with a great sandwich is now fully a great sandwich town.

How did we get here? Part of the answer is that we were here all along. There is, to start, the muffuletta, our distant-second most famous sandwich but itself a classic. If there’s any controversy surrounding the stack of cold cuts and bright olive salad on a pillowy round of Sicilian-derived bread, it’s the question of whether it is best served hot or cold. I am firmly in the latter camp, as practiced at the most famous of muffuletta purveyors, Central Grocery. (The French Quarter shop is still rebuilding since suffering hurricane damage in 2021, but its sandwiches have been available in supermarkets around town.) My reasoning is that heat turns an already oily situation downright viscous while undermining its most admirable traits: the compact construction and portability that make it the perfect travel sandwich. (When my girlfriend and I owned a Volkswagen, we always marked road trips with “a muffuletta in the Jetta.”)

Then there’s the banh mi, which, nearly five decades after Vietnamese immigrants began arriving in South Louisiana in droves, has transcended the awkward cross-cultural sales pitch of “Vietnamese po’boys” to firmly embed itself into the DNA of New Orleans lunch. And would you have guessed the city is sneakily a great Reuben town? I get a classic corned beef, Swiss, and sauerkraut version at Liuzza’s by the Track (when I’m not ordering the shrimp po’boy) but just as often find myself enjoying the deeply satisfying and vegan tempeh Reuben at Sneaky Pickle in Bywater. It emulates the perfect combination of lushness and brightness that elevates the traditional Reuben to the pantheon of all-time greats.

Photo: CEDRIC ANGELES

The lunch rush at Stein’s Market and Deli.

Another Reuben variation is the Rachel, which Dan Stein says is the bestseller at his Stein’s Market and Deli and is made with pastrami. This may confuse visitors, since in most other places “Rachel” indicates the substitution of turkey, but it is in keeping with Stein’s status as a dyspeptic local legend that he refuses to change his. Originally from Philadelphia, he opened what he envisioned as a specialty food store in 2007. Soon he encountered what both he and Richard Sutton, who started the St. James Cheese Company with his wife, Danielle, around the same time, call “the Sandwich Monster.”

“We both wanted to open different businesses but realized that everybody wants sandwiches,” Stein says, in a characteristic style that suggests happiness at being made so miserable.

Photo: Photo: CEDRIC ANGELES

The Rachel, made with pastrami, at Stein’s Market and Deli.

Whatever grudge he and Sutton hold against the Monster, we can be grateful that they kicked off a new wave of non-po’boys. Soon after Stein’s came Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski’s Cochon Butcher, originally a pocket-sized spin-off of Cochon—where the oyster BLT remains one of the city’s best dishes of any kind—and now a thriving laboratory of sandwich creativity in its own right. (Butcher is the only place from which I will grudgingly abide a warmed muffuletta.)

Then, in 2016, came an idiosyncratic, counter-service shop in the Lower Garden District that turned New Orleans’ national sandwich reputation on its head. Depending on how you looked at it, Mason Hereford’s Turkey and the Wolf either obeyed no sandwich tradition or deliriously claimed them all for its own, in the process transforming creations like the smoky, meaty (but vegetarian) collard green melt, the (not at all vegetarian) fried bologna topped with potato chips, and dozens of other specials into legitimate New Orleans classics. It’s worth noting that Hereford sports a tattoo of Dan Stein’s face, one that he points out is slightly larger than another of his wife.

The most recent addition to this gallery of heroes (in both senses) is Tara Francolini, a thirty-three-year-old New Jersey expat who opened Francolini’s last summer. She has brought classic Italian deli sandwiches to a city that sorely lacked them. (A muffuletta is a glorious sandwich, but a different thing.) Her Italian is a straightforward beauty, with its sheaf of meats, sharp provolone, shaved red onion, shredded lettuce, house vinaigrette, and a sprinkling of peperoncini. Once I’d scratched my itch with three or four of those, my attention strayed to the selections featuring Francolini’s obsession with “cutlets”—chicken breasts pounded, breaded, and pan-fried, and then stacked in concoctions like the Dima, which adds fresh mozzarella, soppressata, and Calabrian chile aioli. It’s surely true that, as Francolini’s motto has it, NOT EVERYTHING FROM JERSEY SUCKS, but her shop also means we no longer have to visit the Garden State anytime soon to confirm.

These artisans of bread and meat have brought us into the Sandwich Golden Age. The head spins with options: You looking for fish? Enjoy the contrast of a cornmeal-crusted fillet, pillowy Caribbean coco bread, and the funk of fried plantain at Queen Trini Lisa; or go a completely different direction with the “Muffulettu” at Porgy’s Seafood Market—a pescatarian variation with layers of tuna conserva, giardiniera, pecorino, and anchovy aioli. Don’t forget the bone-in fried pork chop on white bread that Linda Green (better known as the YaKaMein Lady) serves at Jazz Fest; the whitefish salad decorated with pickles and herbs at Flour Moon Bagels; or the vegan po’boy stuffed with crisp pakoras (South Asian chickpea fritters) and dressed with chutneys at Small Mart Cafe.

If some of these seem scandalously un-New Orleans, well, that’s the meaning of a Golden Age, not to mention a cosmopolitan city—the ability to move back and forth between old and new, native and assimilated, sober and outrageous, without blinking an eye.

Which brings us back to the hot-sausage po’boy. Of the canon, it’s probably the least known outside New Orleans, though it’s ubiquitous in town, usually made with burger-like patties from Patton’s Sausage Company, a third-generation business in Bogalusa, Louisiana. The most famous hot-sausage purveyor was once Gene’s Po-Boys, a bright pink institution that closed in 2019.

Since then, I’ve been feeding my craving in two very different ways: One, by heading to Vaucresson’s Creole Cafe and Deli. Vaucresson, a big name in New Orleans sausage, traces its roots back to the turn of the twentieth century. Left without a brick-and-mortar restaurant after Hurricane Katrina, Vance Vaucresson worked until 2022 to open this lunch spot on the site of his family’s old sausage factory, in the Seventh Ward—though fans could still snag the family’s Creole hot sausage every year at Jazz Fest and other events. Now available year-round at the new spot, the sandwich consists of a ruddy link, shot through with cayenne, laid on a po’boy loaf, and dressed, with perfect simplicity, with lettuce, tomato, pickle, and mayo if desired.

On the other end of town, meanwhile, sits Banh Mi Boys, a riotous mash-up that began in a spot attached to a suburban gas station and has since opened a branch on Magazine Street. Banh Mi Boys makes the best case yet for the collision of Vietnamese and New Orleans traditions, nowhere so convincingly as in its Viet Smashburger banh mi, which blends Patton’s hot sausage and the sweeter Vietnamese sausage nem nuong into grill-blistered patties and tops them with both the cool, crisp vegetables of a classic Vietnamese sandwich and a blanket of American cheese and sriracha mayo that inescapably evokes late-night poor decisions at Gene’s.

In these two sausage sandwiches, you have the yin and yang, the top and bottom bread, if you prefer, of New Orleans’ Golden Age. We can all just count ourselves lucky to be enjoying ourselves in the middle.