The Vietnamese are offering banh mi, a toasted baguette filled with pork, and pickled vegetables, and a Dominican and Puerto Rican offering with roast chicken or pork.
I would look forward to testing these tasty sandwiches, but IMHO they are no more "Heroes" than Salsa and Refried Beans on a Tortilla is a Pizza! :) Please nobody steal this tasty idea!! :)
New York's hot heroes speak many languages. No, not the buff guys in the firefighter calendar, but those long, crisp and slightly chewy rolls filled with meat or cheese and served hot from the oven or grill. They are working-class sandwiches, which provide comfort and sustenance any time of day or night.
...I intended to limit my treatment of the hot version to the more familiar and beloved hot Italian-American heroes. But citywide wanderings over the last three months have convinced me that two other sandwiches are ready to take their rightful places in the New York hot heroes pantheon. Already on the rise as part of the New York food scene is the Vietnamese banh mi — a toasted baguette filled with pork, pickled vegetables, fresh coriander and mayonnaise. Restaurants here add things like grilled shrimp and grilled mushrooms.
Not so well known outside their communities, Dominican and Puerto Rican establishments in all five boroughs serve a roast chicken hero, complete with dark meat and skin stripped off the bone, yielding a winning combination of salty and sweet, crispy and tender.
A lechonería is an eating place specializing in pork in many forms, and terrific heroes and hot plates at the brightly lighted Sandy's Lechonería in East Harlem attract everyone in the neighborhood, including construction workers, business executives and the teachers in nearby schools. When you order a roast pork sandwich, the sandwich makers cut the meat freshly off a roasted leg of pork and place it in a crisp hero bread. Once the bread is heated with the pork in it, they take it from the sandwich press and add lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise, as requested. Consider it a succulent cousin of the Cuban sandwich.
They make chicken sandwiches the same way, stripping the dark meat from a quarter roast chicken on the big cutting boards that line the front of the restaurant. When you order a pork chop hero at Sandy's, they fry a fairly thick chop in the kitchen in back before sending it up front to be cut into the sandwich. In a particularly carnivorous touch, they put the bone on top of the sandwich, which means you can gnaw the rest of the meat off it.
It was at Milanes, a modest Dominican storefront restaurant in Chelsea, that I had the chicken sandwich that sent me into orbit. Grecia Milanes, who opened her doors in 1995, strips the flesh and skin from a quarter roasted chicken and fills a Latino-style hero roll, which she toasts in the sandwich press with the meat and skin before layering lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise on the sandwich.
The crispy skin, in combination with the other components, elevate this sandwich to near-mythic status. The sweetness of the mayonnaise, the gamy meatiness of the dark meat chicken and the crispy skin make for the Dominican equivalent of a Peking duck hero. Make sure to ask for the skin to be included on the sandwich, because Ms. Milanes says that many people watching their fat intake do not want it.
Ms. Milanes, who learned to cook from her mother in Puerta Plata in the Dominican Republic, said that freshly roasted chickens are the key.
"A lot of people make sandwiches with chicken breast," she explained. "But we make it in real Santo Domingan style with moist roasted dark meat."
Cibao Restaurant, one of the last ungentrified storefronts on Clinton Street on the Lower East Side, also makes a very fine hot chicken hero, which will set you back a mere $3. At Margon Restaurant in Times Square you can watch Bienvenido Rivas, a fine hero craftsman, make your sandwich on a cutting board in the front of the store. Ask him to put a couple of pieces of crackling (crispy pork skin) on your roast pork hero.
PERHAPS the ultimate cross-cultural hot hero is the sandwich that has become known as a banh mi. In "Authentic Vietnamese Cooking," Corinne Trang translates banh mi as a Saigon baguette. She writes that the Vietnamese "took this quintessential Gallic invention and made it their own by substituting rice flour for half of the wheat flour."
In this country banh mi are made with an Italian hero roll or a French-style baguette. In Vietnam, said Michael Huynh (his nickname is Bao), the chef and an owner of Bao Noodle, at Second Avenue and 22nd Street, the classic banh mi filling is a combination of pork roll (essentially Vietnamese bologna), pork pâté, daikon and carrots pickled in vinegar and sugar, fresh coriander and mayonnaise. The sandwich is usually toasted, mayonnaise included, before the cool pickles and coriander are added.
Here Mr. Huynh uses a French baguette made by the Parisi Bakery in Little Italy, which incidentally makes an estimable meatball parmigiana from noon to 3 p.m. on weekdays. He fills the baguette with grilled chicken thighs, pieces of pork chop or shrimp marinated in fish sauce and lemon grass; pickled vegetables; and fresh coriander. He uses a Japanese mayonnaise, Kewpie, slightly sweeter than Hellmann's. The result is a sandwich that is perfectly balanced, simultaneously hot and cold, sweet and savory, crispy and tender.
Banh mi were introduced in this country more than a decade ago in Chinatown shops in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, home to recent Vietnamese émigrés, banh mi are sold in storefronts. Nin Van Dang opened An Dong, his banh mi shop there, in 1996. He has retired and closed the shop, but the next generation of banh mi makers is on the scene. His daughter Teresa and her husband, Stanley Ng, along with her brother Billy, have opened Nicky's Vietnamese Sandwiches (named for the Ngs' son, Nicky) in the East Village. The Ngs have added a portobello mushroom banh mi, because customers kept clamoring for a vegetarian version.
Banh mi shops have popped up in Chinatown in Manhattan at Sau Voi Corporation, 101-105 Lafayette Street (Walker Street), where you can also buy the latest Vietnamese hit movies and CD's, and in Brooklyn, where I had a killer meatball banh mi at Ba Xuyen in Sunset Park.
THE mother tongue of New York's hot heroes is Italian, and some of the places I previously praised for their cold heroes offer great hot ones, too.
The Italian hero should properly be called an Italian-American hero. Experts on Italian food tell me a chicken parmigiana sandwich has never been served anywhere in Italy. Like the cold sandwich, the hot hero evolved from the latticini (dairy) shops and pork stores that sprouted in New York's Italian neighborhoods in East Harlem; Astoria, Queens; Carroll Gardens and Bensonhurst, Brooklyn; and on Arthur Avenue and in Bedford Park in the Bronx.
Mary Lou Capezza, an owner of the Corona Heights Pork Store in Queens, is perhaps the city's finest hot hero maker. Her training started when her family's store in Astoria made lunchtime sandwiches for the employees of the nearby Con Edison plant, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority workers and those from factories on 19th and 20th Avenues. They were selling so many that they made the fillings in advance and put the sandwiches on a steam table. (I am sure those sandwiches were delicious, but heroes get soggy on a steam table, and the food becomes a gloppy mess.)
When the family opened the Corona Heights Pork Store, a stone's throw from Shea Stadium, Mrs. Capezza did not plan to make sandwiches.
"The brokenhearted guys from the Con Ed plant," she said, "heard that we had set up shop in Corona Heights, and they started coming around asking me to make sandwiches. How could I say no?"
Every sandwich, whether chicken, eggplant parmigiana or potato and egg, made with her husband's fresh mozzarella, is made to order. So you should call in your order or be prepared to wait 20 minutes to half an hour.
Why are these hot heroes so good?
"I cook here like I cook at home," Mrs. Capezza said. "My meatballs are made with freshly ground pork, bread crumbs, fresh basil and a little bit of imported Italian pecorino Romano cheese. My sauce is made with pork, onions, basil, olive oil, California tomatoes and a little bit of garlic. My chicken cutlets are made with bread crumbs, garlic, Romano cheese and basil and dipped in egg batter."
When a chicken parmigiana hero is ordered at the store, Mrs. Capezza fries the chicken cutlets, then tops them with her husband's mozzarella before placing them in a pot of her sauce. The mozzarella melts there. The tang of the Romano cheese blends with the creaminess of the mozzarella and the sweetness of the sauce.
You can get the sandwich on a standard fairly soft hero roll, but a better choice is a crispy, chewy brick-oven baguette from Rose and Joe's Bakery in Astoria.
A few blocks from Ms. Capezza's store, the DeBenedittis family has been making serious hot heroes for years at Leo's Latticini, also known as Mama's. Marie DeBenedittis, one of three sisters running the place under the watchful eye of their octogenarian mother, makes hot meat sandwiches with superb gravy and homemade mozzarella.
Tuesday through Saturday, Ms. DeBendittis roasts remarkably moist turkey breast, but Thursday is roast beef and roast pork day. The pork is so meaty and juicy it does not need gravy, but the properly salted gravy, combined with fresh mozzarella, makes for a terrific combination.
The old Italian neighborhoods of Brooklyn are home to many a fine hot hero establishment. In Carroll Gardens, John and George Esposito make an exemplary hero at the pork store bearing their name, a sweet Italian sausage sandwich topped with sautéed broccoli rabe and a schmear of fresh ricotta. I turn to it when my wife accuses me of avoiding green vegetables.
Brooklyn is also where the warm roast beef hero, made with fresh mozzarella and gravy, rules. I enjoy these scrumptious beauties at John's in Bensonhurst and at Lioni's in Dyker Heights. But the hot roast beef — and roast pork, too — sandwich of my dreams is served at Clemente's, a little grocery and butcher shop in Gravesend. In the same shop he started working in as a 12-year-old, Clemente Aquilino makes everything from scratch, the roast beef made from the bottom round cut, the roast loin of pork, the mozzarella and the peppery and garlicky pork and beef gravies made from pan drippings.
"I'm living the American dream," Mr. Aquilino said. "From clean-up boy to president."
Hot heroes have also allowed Ms. Milanes, Mrs. Capezza and Mr. Huynh, who came to this country as a scared 16-year-old rescued at sea by the Navy, to live the American dream. That was then, but this is now. I might have caught a glimpse of the next wave at Ba Xuyen, as I was leaving with six banh mi in hand.
"You should come back soon," the smiling woman behind the counter called out. "We have good bagels, too."
The
New York Times > Dining & Wine > Lo, a New Age of Heroes
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/01/
dining/01HERO.html