The NYC Sandwich Shop Making America's Forgotten Sandwiches | On The Line | Bon Appétit

20 Blocks is a sandwich shop in New York City. We have spent close to two years going through cookbooks, vintage magazines, and the depths of the internet to uncover historical and old-time sandwich recipes. There is no AI, there is no robots. What we do here is create a moment where people experience something new. Everything from our mayo to our house-made juice to our house-fried chips are made here. In two weeks, we will be throwing out our beloved late summer menu and moving to a completely new menu. We are so incredibly inspired by a thousand maybe more dishes that we have already uncovered, and we're so excited to be able to get the chance to cook them for you. Morning, guys. It's Griffin Valentine here at 20 Blocks in the heart of the East Village. It's 8 a.m. It's going to be a busy day. Our order just came in. I'm going to get everybody involved. All hands on deck to put it away. The ethos here is definitely cooking with the seasons and having this ever-changing mentality. Right now we have three sandwiches on the menu, turkey sandwich, corn grilled cheese, and a bacon, lettuce, and peach sandwich. Is that scallions? No, yeah, it goes straight into that thing. One of the philosophies that we very often like to talk about is how sandwiches are foods that might take a really long time to make, but are eaten in seconds. And our goal is to make sure that they are remembered for as long as possible. So all of our deliveries are put away. We're going to get into a little bit of the corn production. All the corn's been shucked, it's been charred, and I'm going to just kind of work on getting some of it cut off the cob. I'm going to tell you guys right now, best corn is from Jersey. You know, maybe, maybe a little biased because I'm from Jersey myself, but best corn and best blueberries are from New Jersey. This is part of our corn star sandwich. Really what it is, is charred sweet corn, scallions, chives, avarti cheese, cheddar cheese, a few dry spices. And then the kicker of it all is the cowboy candy. Cowboy candy is basically a candied and slightly pickled jalapeno. The story of Cowboy Candy kind of goes that this seven-year-old girl, Mindy Hieronymus, I think is her last name, she had perfected her family's bread and butter pickle recipe and decided, well, why not try that on jalapenos? Here's this nugget of gold from this random place in America. This is what came out of it, and people love it. There's a few things that I'm pretty particular about on melts. One is that There's cheese on both sides, so that the whole sandwich is put together. The other is making sure that we don't have a soggy melt. And I think that that can be a really tall task. But this is, you know, really all in the way of creating that. All the corn is set. We're just going to throw it in the fridge for a little bit while the rest of this kind of starts to go, and we're going to mix it later. We're going to work on the turkey brine now. This is our recipe almanac. This book has probably been in use for maybe three months. I'm just going to flip to our turkey brine. The brine that I'm working on is for our turkey that we roast in-house. It's relatively a two to three day process. We get our turkeys in, we actually poach them in the brine, and then we cool them down, slice them, and serve them. It's important to brine a turkey specifically because no one likes a dry turkey. The final version of this sandwich, we have our house roasted and sliced turkey on our honey whole wheat bread with a Cajun mayo that we also make here in-house. Then we have fried green tomatoes, which was just like a little southern comfort classic that we decided we wanted some texture on the sandwich and something different, and that's just kind of how we came up with it. And it's definitely one of our most popular sandwiches to date. We give this a quick little mix, and then I'm just going to move into the next thing on my list today, which is do a little R&D on our new dessert. R&D means research and development. I think it's a loose term that I like to use of making new stuff. We're prepping out a little bit of what's called gooey butter cake. It is a St. Louis, Missouri staple. History behind it is that a German immigrant baker was trying to make a butterkuchen or like a butter cake. and had messed up the proportions and created this thing. This was like during the time of the Great Depression and rather than spill it out, what they decided to do was serve it and see what happened. We're not trying to reinvent what this is, we are trying to actively showcase what American food could look like and this is one of those things where I like to say we're putting Americans on American food. The cake kind of has two parts. It has this slightly denser cake undercarry that holds this gooey sugar-butter mixture that, as it bakes, kind of turns into this goop. And once it is set, it has this beautiful crinkle top to it. One sec. Got a few eggs, they're gonna go straight into the batter. We've creamed butter and sugar, we've added a few eggs, and now we've added a bunch of our wet liquids. I've made this once before and it's gone pretty well. What we had decided was that there needed to be more, so we're scaling the recipe to kind of have the correct ratio between the bottom short bread biscuit and the top gooeyness. The batter can be a little bit difficult to work with. I think it's very indicative of the fact that this recipe at one point was a mistake. So while it might be a little bit difficult to work with, I think this is just kind of the natural order of how it's going to go. So this is kind of where we're at with the gooey butter cake bottom base. It's just going to sit on top of the oven for a few hours, and then we'll slather on a batter on top of it and throw it all in the oven. All right, so I got a little bit of time on my hands. We have a menu coming out in the next few weeks. You know, everything being research-based, it takes a lot of time to get to that point. So I'm coming down to really just start thinking about winter and spring. I think there's a few different ways that we go about R&D here, old and historic. I like to go through this book right here. It's A Way to a Man's Heart, the Settlement Cookbook. It's a book from the 1940s. This is, you know, probably 200 recipes in one little bag of just random things that we've found over time. I have a few Excel sheets. What we have here is a overview of random things. We have basically written down what it is, who found it, on what date, where it came from, and at what time in the world it was when this thing came to be. So the first thing we do is desserts. A perfect example is ambrosia, baked Alaska. Bananas Fosters, black and white cookies, which I'm sure eventually we will be doing. We've definitely talked a lot about, like, can you make a dessert sandwich? Whoopie Pie is a great example of that. Ice cream sandwiches are a great one. Naturally, our biggest section in this whole research is our sandwich section. Cucumber tea sandwiches, club sandwiches, egg salad sandwiches, Filet-O-Fish, fluffernutters, fried spam sandwiches, lamb and mint jelly, PB&Js, po' boys, St. Paul sandwiches, I really want to do a St. Paul sandwich, tomato sandwiches, tuna melts, all these different things. It is a joy and a privilege to be able to be some of the people who are focusing on how to bring some of these things back in a new, fun way. Coming from a fine dining background, I think that there's so much intention that goes into that food. And I think the idea is, you know, the intention can be in sandwiches as well. Like, why not trade the plate for two pieces of bread? So I'm going to be working on a little bit of family meal here. So one of the things that I'm really excited about on this next menu is our ham and cheese sandwich. It's kind of At this point gone through the whole R&D process and the thing that I like to do at this point is make the food for the staff and kind of get the like last tweaks done through everyone's opinions on the food. My favorite piece of equipment is this right here which is a little serrated sandwich spreader. It's a tool that I found in my grandma's kitchen when I was growing up. I don't know what what it is but it has like a very safe place in my heart. Our riff on the ham and cheese sandwich is using the fall harvest. Right now I'm spreading apple butter that we make here on, you know, one side of the bread. Basically what I've done is I've taken apples, cored them, peeled them, cooked them down with a little bit of dijon, garlic, onions, and a few other things, and then obviously a touch of butter, and cooked them down all the way to the point where you can puree them. So it is basically like this really beautiful, delicate apple puree. So on the other side we have this like Very traditional steakhouse compound garlic butter. There's some confit garlic in there. There's a good amount of raw garlic in there, and that's, like, the sharpness in the entire sandwich that kind of cuts through all of this, like, richness from the apple butter and the ham and the cheese. The next step is to cheese both sides and then meet the inside. Eight slices of cheese, four slices of side. We had tried smoked gouda, we had tried cheddar, we had tried Havarti, which is currently on, like, one of our melts right now. Lo and behold, the provolone is, like, just has this salinity and sharpness to it that just complements the rest of the sandwich really well. Every sandwich has a pre-portioned amount of meat on it. Yesterday, I shaved all this ham, and then I went back through it, and portioned it. so that a cook can just grab it, unwrap it, and throw it on the sandwich. I think one of the most important ingredients in, like, a deli meat sandwich is air. I think Helen Rosner from the New Yorker had put out a review saying such. It just creates this ability for us to be able to squish and mold and shape the meat where as you eat it, it just coats your palate a little bit better than like very flat sliced meat that would be sliced thicker. I'm now going to pass family meal off to the cooks. They're gonna take it from here. They're going to do a little bit of searing it off, cooking it. We are about five minutes out from opening. This is Jack Diaz, one of the owners here. And today he's our frontman. Right now we have a line pumping out the door. Service. Service. Service. Have a good service. Have a good service. Come on through. Have a good service. We have kind of like an assembly line. Back there we have Chef Diaz. He's kind of on the hotline. That's everything from frying our tomatoes, toasting bread, searing off grilled cheese sandwiches, making sure that they're hot. Those things will then get pushed to our staging area, which is where Alex lives. It is everything from looking at the ticket board, grouping the tickets, and kind of staging it for the next person, which is where I'm currently working, which is our sandwich wrapping area. We'll have a bunch of built sandwiches right here for me to wrap. And then pass them to our final section of the line, which is the front of house expo, hot soup, cold salads area, where we are packaging orders and bringing them out to guests. We toast and rest all of our bread, which kind of happens right over here. This will come out of the salamander and we'll put it on these trays here to rest. We only toast one side. We think that it creates the correct medium of crunch to softness that bread has. And just like all good meat, bread has to rest as well. We're looking at three by one turkeys. And four corns and three BLPs. I prepared some of the turkey earlier. We had the brine going. This is kind of the final product. We do mayo on both sides, a nice large slathering from edge to edge, and then we'll kind of build the rest of the sandwich, which will be turkey, fried green tomatoes, and a little bit of romaine. Because of how nice and Then the turkey is shredded. We like to kind of crunch it and spread it out on the sandwich. That kind of just creates the amount of air that we were talking about earlier on the whole sandwich. At this point, really all that's left to do is wrap sandwiches by order. We have two wraps. Our first wrap is internal. We like cutting our sandwiches. The idea of being able to cut it in the package makes it so that our sandwiches stay together. So we like to draw on all the sandwiches. Throughout the day it's just a few different fun little things. I think it's probably one of the most important parts of the whole job. When we talk about the uniform here, I think that being able to allow everybody to come in and cook in their own clothes, makes you kind of feel like you're at home or that your friends are cooking for you. But we definitely did want to have some sort of resemblance of unity. And being that one of our colors here is yellow, Jack, Will and I spent way too much time finding vintage yellow hats on eBay, trading with friends and so on and so forth. Actually, one of the things we did at the beginning The conception of the restaurant was, if somebody brought in a yellow hat, we would barter with them. For the first few weeks, it was a yellow hat for a free sandwich. So that's how we kind of amassed a bunch of different yellow hats. I would say that the bartering system will forever be in play. We have definitely started to be a little more selective about the yellow hats that come through the door. A corn sandwich just came in. Here she is, in all of her glory. Edge to edge, golden brown and delicious. The optimal range for getting sandwiches out, especially while we have a line, I would say is anywhere between five and eight minutes. So the BLP, which we have a few orders for, is what I'm working right now. This one's a perfect example of like trying to really figure out structure. So we try and get all of our peaches cut the same way, all laid out the same way on the sandwich, so that when you get a cross-section and when you eat something, there is a really similar bite in the whole sandwich, always. One of the things here that we do is the heavier items on the bottom. Most of the time that's going to be your protein or your main contents, but I think when you eat a sandwich, just like if you saw a burger, you'd never see a burger with the patty on the top. This is a perfect example of how intentional we are with some of the sauces. You'll see that the BLP doesn't have as much sauce on it as the turkey does, reason being is there's already so much fat and sugar in the sandwich because of the peaches and the bacon that we don't want to overload people's senses. This was a perfect example of, like, how to make something 20 blocks. Playing around with the idea of what a BLT is, going into that diner culture. Why not change out a few things? Create something that is going to be viewed as our own. We're winding down from service. It's been a great day having you in. We are cooling off, and I think we're going to kick you out now. Thanks.