Tag Archives: Sandwiches

restaurants, Wuxi

A Sandwich Shop with a Silly Name

When searching out foreign food in China, bread can be a source of contention. When one is used to eating the western variety, one’s mouth is not really prepared slightly salty or sweet tastes. This can also wreck havoc when making a sandwich. To paraphrase a line of thinking back in New Jersey, the innards of a sandwich can be awesome, but if the bread is awful, the sandwich will end up as a rank failure. So, when you find a shop that mostly gets it right, it is a cause for celebration. In this regard, let’s consider Bagelous Head in Wuxi.

This place is relatively new, and it is located next to a shop that sells New York style pizza by the slice and another offering very messy hotdogs. The specialty at this shop, allegedly, are bagels.

Let’s get one thing out of way. If one is a bagel snob — and I am not — these don’t taste like bagels. This is because this type of bread is boiled first, baked second. This leads to a tough, dense, and chewy texture. Bagelous Head’s offerings do not taste that way. They are more like donut-like-in-shape bread rings.

That being said, what is on the shop’s menu still works well. They don’t have the earlier noted issues that come with a lot of Chinese bread. So, while technically not a bagel, the bread quality is still good. Let’s consider a few of offerings one by one. Keep in mind that following pictures are of take out, and these sandwich were eaten after driving back to Changzhou from Wuxi. So, they sat in a car for a little over an hour.

This is listed as a mozzarella Rueben. It certainly isn’t that. Reubens tend to have sauerkraut and cheese on cured meat — usually pastrami or corned beef. The meat here tastes more like cured beef one can buy in Chinese supermarkets, which means it’s slightly spicy and like nothing you’d ever find in a Jewish deli. That being said, it’s still a good sandwich, and I would have no problem ordering it again upon a return visit.

This is shredded pork with red cabbage and pickles. Also, quite good.

Here we have a vegetarian — but not vegan — friendly tomato, avocado and egg sandwich. The simplicity works very well here.

This is tuna and mozzarella served in an open-faced style. My dining partner wanted this, and I was initially hesitant at first. In America, there are things called tuna melts, which is essentially what this is. I used to hate them, because the only time I ever had them were in high school and college cafeterias. These sorts of places always like to cut corners for budgetary reasons, and to that end, the alleged diary product used was processed American.

Let’s face it, that stuff really isn’t cheese and typically isn’t all that great. Personally speaking, I only want it on eggs or on a burger. Also, maybe in a grilled ham and cheese. But, That’s about it. Oh, and the 20-slice abomination Burger King is serving in Thailand is unforgivable.

Getting back to the point at hand, I was surprised I liked this. The tuna itself had been dusted with oregano, and of course, if I said I hated mozzarella in general, the ghosts of my Italian ancestors would torment and haunt me. Bagelous Head actually made me rethink the concept of a tuna melt. Good for them.

This shop is in easy walking distance from the Sanyang Plaza subway station where Wuxi Metro lines 1 and 2 intersect.

For those driving there, the best place to park is beneath the 66 Center 恒隆广场. The shop, and it’s too also good neighbors, is two blocks away on foot. If one does choose to park there, though, be warned: getting in and out involves driving one of the most insanely narrow spirals I have ever seen.

restaurants, Shanghai

When Komplet is not Complete

FART (verb): an action where gas collected in the rectum passes through the anus and into open and commonly breathable air, sometimes rather violently. (Definition source: the author of this blog post)

In linguistics, there is a thing called false cognates. A more friendlier term might be false friends. These are words that look and sound alike across two different languages, but the meanings are not the same. When you are learning a new language, these words and letters are misleading and can lead to embarrassment when used improperly. Consider the above provided definition. I know it rather well. I have done it often, especially after eating beans and drinking a lot of cheap malt liquor in my university studies in West Virginia. People still accuse me of doing it to this very day. And to those critics, I normally retort, with all the legal wisdom and judicial acumen I can summon: He who smelt it dealt it! A common rejoinder to that is: He who denied it supplied it!

And yes, I just lobbed a fart joke, which is a very low bar if you’re writing humor. Yet, stop and consider if you’re a Russian trying to learn English. Think of the following.

ФАРТ (noun): a Russian world that can mean “luck.” If transliterated from Cyrillic to a Latin alphabet, it would phonetically read as FART.

Not knowing false cognates or false friends can lead to highly embarrassing moments. Imagine a Russian immigrant in Brooklyn, New York City, trying to impress a sexy native New York fashionista by wishing her “All the farts imaginable!” That well-meaning schmuck would get slapped in the face five ways of Sunday.

I know this first hand — but not because I once pissed off a Brooklynite diva. I value my life too much to ever do that. During my first year in China, I once made the mistake of describing my clothing style as shabby to my college class. I, of course, was speaking of the holes in my pants and dress shirt. They erupted in laughter. I looked utterly confused. Then, one of my students rather bashfully informed me that shabby sounds a lot like 傻逼 shǎbī, which can be taken as dumb fuck or motherfucker in Chinese. You can rest assured I never made that speaking mistake again.

Not all false cognates are overly dramatic and embarrassing, though. Some of the most mundane can be found between the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. Cyrillic Р actually represents the Latin R sound, and В sounds more like the English V. A Cyrillic Н is not an English H, because it’s actually N. Don’t call Я a backwards R, because it represents the sound Ya. And so on. Of course, this is not just limited to the alphabet that Russia and a large section of Eastern Europe uses. Translating the names of food dishes usually leads to some types of language weirdness. That can be from Chinese into English, and also from Serbian into English.

This is the Sunday-only menu at Yugo Bar in Shanghai’s Jing’an district. It’s a relatively new place that serves Serbian food. The last time I was in Shanghai, I was itching to try this place. I never had Serbian food, but as an American with some Slavic blood (Polish) in my family, my curiosity had been stoked and I simply had to investigate. Since I am from New Jersey, I also simply can’t refuse a sandwich and I wanted to try the komplet.

This particular sandwich consisted of beef salad — which tasted like shredded beef mixed with mayonnaise. The condiment slathered onto the Serbian egg bread is kaymak, which is like a sweet, skimmed butter after being churned. There’s also pickles and slices of a type of cured beef that reminded me a lot of Italian bresaola. Think dry-aged prosciutto, but beef and not pork as the cured meat.

image borrowed from here: https://www.pantsdownapronson.com/beef-bresaola-recipe/

I cannot simply say I liked this sandwich. This was love at first bite. Amazed — I was just simply amazed by this komplet. It wasn’t just that, either.

I loved the spicy sausages. Think of what Polish-Americans like to call kielbasa (and actual Poles freak out about that and want to correct their American friends and worst enemies with That’s just a general word for all sausages in our language! What the hell are you talking about?!?!) I write the parenthetical, of course, because we are talking about translation weirdness. It’s like the main thesis here. Anyhow, take what Americans mistake as Polish sausage and just kick up the heat a little. It’s just absolutely delicious. The sausage and sandwiches made me fall in love very hard with Yugo Bar.

Then there was the décor. It consisted of reproductions of the Josip Broz Tito “Not USSR but still Communist” propaganda from when Yugoslavia was a country and didn’t disintegrate into a bunch of extremely violent squabbling nations during the 1990s. That actually happened after he died.

Josip Broz Tito. Is he having a post-lunch smoke and wistfully thinking of a sandwich he just ate? Probably not. Keeping Yugoslavia together was a little more difficult than that.

I will absolutely not say I was transported to Serbia or the former Yugoslavia by eating this komplet. That would be false. We’re talking about a pub that serves sandwiches in Shanghai, after all. I have never been to Serbia and don’t know what the country is like. What Yugo Bar did was far more insidious. It made me very curious about Serbian food. It was so much so that I had to go into jealous-smitten-man-who’s-just-met-a-sexy-girl mode. I had to spend long hours using Google to find out as much information as possible. Yes, I actually stalked Serbian food on the Internet.

The results were actually confusing, and this is where we come back to false cognates. The Serbian word “Komplet” looks awful lot like the English “complete.” This is not so.

It is not a “Serbian Complete Sandwich.” This makes the sandwich sound like it is the most Serbian sandwich ever. The word complete, after all, conveys a sense of totality, and komplet doesn’t mean that. It means “set.” A friend from the Balkans remarked that the word can be used for a sandwich that has multiple elements between two fluffy bits of Serbian-styled bread —hence, a set of ingredients. In short, it can be taken as another word for sandwich with multiple ingredients.

I can imagine somebody staring holes into my face at the moment, saying komplet or complete? Who really cares, and why are you splitting linguistic hairs? And that would be a valid question. To that, I will answer. If a sandwich can send me into a tizzy of research into linguistic theory across different alphabets , I must of have loved the taste very, very much. And I did. You should try it. too.

Unfortunately, Yugo Bar is still relatively new and is not findable on Baidu Maps or Wechat Map Sharing. In Shanghai, it’s in Jing’an, and it’s not that far from West Nanjing Road and the American Consulate.

restaurants, Shanghai

Great Pastrami at Tock’s Montreal Deli

When I raised the sandwich to my mouth,  it fell apart into a disgusting pile of steak, mayonnaise, corn kernels, and more. I glared at the mess on my plate.  I tried to quell my mounting rage, because — well — sane people don’t lose their minds over hoagies. Also, I shouldn’t have gotten so excited that a new sandwich place opened at Xinbei Wanda Plaza. I set myself up for disappointment.  In the end, I told myself that this is normal for a Chinese city like Changzhou.  The Dragon City is not Manhattan, Brooklyn, or New Jersey. Jewish delis do not exist here.

One does, however, exist in Shanghai, and to say it’s awesome is an understatement. They smoke their own meat and make their own pastrami. In Canada, this would be called “Montreal smoked meat,” but it’s essentially the same thing as pastrami. Montreal does have a legacy of Jewish immigration that also brought kosher deli traditions, and that’s what gives Tock’s — on the other side of the world in China — unique character.

Obviously, the pastrami is the signature menu item, here. It’s featured a few different sandwiches and platters. There are three versions of this cured and brined beef, too, and the differences depend on how much fat you are willing to consume. So, there is a lean, a medium, and a fatty version that you can specify. The times I have eaten there, the waitstaff have always recommended “medium” as the most popular among regular customers. That’s what I had, and it was just perfect, and pastrami really is my favorite lunch meat of all time.  It’s one of the few thing I actually miss about living in New Jersey. I guess you can say that’s also why this deli really was “love at first bite” for me.

As for the two other specialties available, there is smoked duck and smoked chicken. The smoked duck is just glorious. The resulting sandwich was just meat and bread, but the flavor of the meat, piled high and served warm, could give Tock’s pastrami a run for it’s money. While very good, the duck here will always come in second, however.

The smoked chicken is in a distant third. Don’t get me wrong. It’s good, but it just does not have the strong, distinctive flavor of pastrami or duck. Tock’s has a menu option where you can have two different meats within one sandwich. It would be best to pair the chicken with the pastrami or the duck. Pairing the duck and the pastrami would be a bad idea, since you would have two unique, complex flavors clashing with each other.

Tock’s also has poutine. This is a food nearly all my Canadian friends are passionate about. In other English languages cultures, we would call these “wet fries” — fried potatoes smothered with a topping. In that regard, I guess you could argue that “chili fries” would be an American version of poutine. In Canada, this delicious bit of junk food has gravy and cheese curds as basic toppings that could be built upon. Tock’s provides this, but they also have versions that include chopped smoked meat. You can either order a large portion of whatever poutine preference, or you can pay extra and have your side of fries jazzed up beside your sandwich.

I have always left Tock’s stuffed and satisfied. Every time I go there, or some of the other great food places in Shanghai, it gives me the patience to persevere through some of the more blundering attempts you might find in Changzhou start-up sandwich places. That’s not to say Changzhou is bad; I live here and it’s my point of reference. You can find similar experiences in other smaller-sized Chinese cities. In short, Tock’s is absolutely worth a stop while you are visiting  Shanghai and conducting other business.

Tock’s Montreal Deli can be found in The Bund. It is walking distance from the East Nanjing Road subway station, which services Line 2 and Line 11.  It can be found on Henan Road.