The commercials that air during NFL broadcasts tend to celebrate the action, which I really appreciate. It's not always clear what these actions are about – why all the broken concrete falls heavily on the back of a pickup truck with a grille designed to resemble the face of a scowling police officer, why the people in commercials for various pharmaceuticals so happy to show up at the party they just showed up at. But given that these ads are intended for people who do nothing or do nothing other than sit in slumped and undignified positions most commonly associated with older dogs, it's still a nice touch. “This seems to be your thing,” the commercials say, as dusty men pat each other on the back and use their trucks to tow stuff, to viewers who will discover an hour later that a pristine tortilla chip has rested on theirs upper abdomen for an unknown period of time. “Yeah,” I think, sitting completely still as the sun sets outside, “that’s actually pretty much my shit.”
If you apply something like this in sufficient quantities over the course of a day, you can't help but have an effect. And so, after an afternoon in the blog chair on Sunday, I realized it was time to celebrate my own act and take action. I did this not by laughing and dancing at a wedding while someone off camera recited a list of increasingly worrisome side effects, or by driving a truck to the very edge of a hill, but by crossing the road to the Deli went which makes my strangest and most unusual food favorite sandwich for special occasions. After a tiring day at the construction site, I discovered that nothing tastes as good as a sandwich with three crushed samosas on it.
To me, this is a special occasion sandwich, not because it's expensive, which it isn't; The samosa sandwich at Punjabi Junction is $8 and can be upgraded to a hero roll for an additional dollar. It's also not a sandwich for special occasions, because it's particularly delicious. I don't know how many calories it has, but it's not as blatantly and insanely irresponsible in that regard as some of the large format Italian sandwiches available in my neighborhood. It's special to me because I like the bright, heavy, and frankly confusing way it tastes, but also because it just seems like something you shouldn't eat all the time. This is difficult, by the way, because I would definitely eat it for lunch every day if I could change my attitude towards it. If such a sandwich had existed twenty years ago, when I didn't think about such a thing at all and did such a thing all the time, I probably would have done it. But it hadn't been invented yet. You can't rush something like this; The Universe will provide it when it is time, and not sooner.
“I only know of one other in town,” Eater critic Robert Sietsema mentioned in an appreciative review of the sandwich last August. By this point, Punjabi Junction had been open for a few years and I had my order figured out; I don't know where the other samosa sandwich is, but I feel good about the one I have. The other stuff is good too; The steam trays of Indian specialties heated to order were fine by me, and I'm not ashamed to report that the sight of a board reading “It's Biryani Sunday” easily and effortlessly moved me to have a few of buying and consuming biryani, like it was Biryani Sunday and stuff like that. But the more avant-garde sandwiches were and are the highlight for me. Everything about them will be familiar to a person who has bought a standard sandwich at a deli or eaten Indian food, although as someone who has done a lot of both, it never really occurred to me that they could make such a sandwich For example, you could make a grilled piece of paneer cheese as a replacement for the well-known delicatessen cold cuts.
I resisted the samosa sandwich for longer than I thought possible, not because I didn't want to eat it – I love sandwiches and I love samosas – but because I had trouble imagining how it would work. It was like reading the words “dumpling burger” or “pastrami calzone.” These are things I like, but not in an order that I can fully understand. The saliva impulses triggered by my associations with these words fire as the insistent higher parts of my brain start talking about how “impractical” or “perverted and a little British” it seemed to do something that was more or is less savory. on a sandwich. I asked and was told what it was – a sandwich with a few crushed samosas on it and also “everything”, meaning anything that could fit on a sandwich, depending on how much of everything was behind the counter at the time. That helped, but also not; In any case, I've made the decision and now I mostly try not to do it three or more times a week.
Here's what it is. A completely familiar deli roll is run through the toaster. This bun is then topped with the similarly familiar deli sandwich found behind the counter – the sandwich is often, perhaps always, a little different than I remembered. Sometimes it has yellow deli mustard on it, but generally not. Sometimes there are cucumbers. Sometimes there is a small chilled bag of green chutney, and those are good days.
None of this really matters; These supporting players hang out in the corners or lurk in the dunker's spot, sometimes clapping their hands more confidently than others while the rest of the sandwich does the work. The heavy lifting is done by the stuff that gets cooked on the grill. These are the samosas that are pressed onto the flat surface, marked on both sides and then placed on the sandwich and garnished with a few shakes of spicy masala. This also includes strips of green pepper, onions and small rounds of small hot green chilies placed on top. It has more textural integrity than you'd expect, as much textural contrast as you could possibly imagine—there's pastry and potatoes and wild green peas and that appealingly papery deli salad—and retains the ability to confuse and confuse for a long time delight after the initial novelty wears off.
That's partly because it's never quite the same, and partly because it refuses to live up to any other type of sandwich I've had anywhere else. It's reliable, but there's something reliably unstable about it. I think that's a good way a sandwich can be – good enough to call you back, but stubborn enough to never give you what it gave you before. After a long day at the construction site or a rainy Sunday debating whether I really needed to write about Zach Wilson's 300-yard throw, I can't think of anything else I'd rather eat.