The Fine Dining Chef Behind One of NYC’s Best Sandwich Shops | On The Line | Bon Appétit

I left the best restaurant in the world to make sandwiches.

I was at 11 Madison Park.

Most of my career has been in fine dining restaurants.

Brown Bag Sandwich Company

is a neighborhood sandwich shop.

Most of our sandwiches

are chopped to essentially make sure that you're getting a bite of everything that's in that sandwich.

It just ensures a perfect bite every time.

Hey guys, I'm Antonio,

co-owner and chef of Brown Bag Sandwich Company.

It's 8:45, so the first thing I'm going to do is get our menu

set up in our A-frame.

We're more centered around businesses.

Because of that, our lunch rush is insane.

And between 11:30 and 1:00 p.m., it's non-stop.

On an average day, we could easily be doing

250 sandwiches in that 90 minutes.

So, right now I'm going to go downstairs.

I'm going to take a look at the list. This is Jose.

Jose is one of our prep cooks.

He's an absolute godsend.

He gets here at 6:00

in the morning every single day.

Jose is going to be helping us out with the Italian today.

We batch out our Italian mixture, which is the base of the sandwich.

We like it to marinate

for a few hours before service.

It actually intensifies the flavor

and on top of that it makes it efficient for us for when we're

in service to be able to produce sandwiches

in a timely manner.

Everything's weighed out to make sure that the customer is getting the same product over and over.

So far, we've gotten most everything into this bowl.

So, we're going to add basil.

And then what we do is we take a pizza cutter.

Because it's in a bowl, the rounded blade

allows it to chop through the mixture

easier than a knife.

and it's quicker than using scissors.

So in the Italian

we have pushcido, soada,

tomato, cherry peppers, onion,

basil, mozzarella, and sharp provolone.

I think if we were not chopping the sandwich, it'd be hard to put

all these ingredients in there.

I mean, how many times have you had a cool cut sandwich,

you take a bite, the pushcuto's

pulling out, and it's getting everywhere.

So this way, it just ensures a perfect bite every time.

We also have lists for our prep.

Everything's kind of broken down into categories.

This is prep that needs to happen first

because these are the items that are going to take a while to complete.

I've come from fine dining restaurants.

So, organization was just kind of like instilled in me.

Some might say beaten into me.

So, Jose is done.

I'm going to go upstairs.

In 20 minutes, we're going to have to start making

our catering So, it's 9:15.

First, I need to introduce you to my business partner and co-owner, Jill.

We're going over the catering order.

The client wants our sandwiches

to be placed on platters, which isn't typical.

So, we're going to kind of problem solve around this.

As for stickers when we're putting these on the platter,

I think we're going to have to

stand the sandwich up

because if we lay it down, I don't think we're going to have enough

room with the platters.

>> We actually have a big catering order today.

30 Caesar wraps, 23

turkey club, and then 15 regular Italian,

and two >> It's like that Henry Ford style assembly.

This sandwich line is is actually going to essentially finish off the hot sandwiches

that are coming from the griddle right here.

So, they'll start there.

They'll move their way down here.

All the ingredients that need to go into each sandwich are going to complete

those and then be passed down.

And on the other side of the griddle is going to be our cold sandwiches.

So, we kind of try to separate that so the menu mix is spread

out and one employee isn't getting hammered with every sandwich.

We have kind of cheats

sheets up here for all the sandwiches.

They have weights on

the filling along with the other ingredients

that are going to go on top of the sandwich,

both Spanish and This is our mixture for the Caesar wrap.

So in here we have shredded Roma

chicken that we're making in house, croutons that we've made in house,

obviously the Caesar dressing.

So he's going to chop this

and we're going to start to

fill them, roll them, and wrap them.

This is a sandwich once it's been assembled.

You can see all the ingredients in there. Everything's chopped.

It's an even mixture and layout across the sandwich.

Someone takes a bite here, here, or here, doesn't really matter.

They're going to get all of the ingredients in one bite.

I'm going to get started on our Caesar wraps.

It's quite literally about a pound of filling in each wrap.

Again, we're focusing on making sure it's a consistent bite.

We've completed the catering order.

We've placed everything on platters.

I'm uh excited to see how the delivery driver is going to

take this and bring it to the location. It is 10:30.

Our doors are officially

open to the public.

We just got our first order.

It's going to be our hot roast beef and cheddar.

So, we're going to start with our bread.

We use the seeded sesame hero.

It comes from Paresi

Bakery, old school Italian bakery.

All of our bread is going to be toasted in clarified butter.

It makes a sandwich a better product at the end of the day.

The weights on top of the bread ensure

that the bread is going to get toasted evenly.

It's then going to go into our seasoned beeftock.

We have these nice little

pasta baskets that have kind of worked out well for us.

This is how we're going to heat up the roast beef itself.

On the bottom of the bread is going to be our brown bag sauce

that was concepted from this product called Ransom Pickle.

It's an English product. It's sweet. It's tangy.

You could think of it almost like a

chunky barbecue So, we have our beef.

Next is going to be our cheddar sauce.

We're making this in house.

We could easily just buy

pre-made sauce, but I want to use real cheddar cheese.

On top of the cheddar are going to be fried onions.

This is actually a product that I do not make in house.

These are French's fried onions. I love them.

They stay crispy forever.

Not every sandwich from the shop is going to be chopped.

And the roast beef just doesn't need that additional step.

Okay, so order just came in for a chopped cheese.

What we've done to set oursel up for service,

we've essentially pre-batched 20 chopped cheeses.

Onions are going to go underneath.

That's going to help to steam them out.

All of the drippings

from the burger patties are going to funnel their way down into the onions.

And from here, we're going to start the chopping process.

And it's a process.

So, if a customer comes in and they want to chop cheese, we're able

to give it to them in that 5m minute window or less.

If we were to make every single chopped cheese to order, when it gets

busy, they're going to be waiting upwards of 30 minutes

if you're doing one at a time.

Each one of those

little bundles of cheese is three slices of American,

which is one portion of chopped cheese.

So, she's putting 20 of these bundles,

aka 60 slices of cheese,

onto the mixture right now.

It's a lot of cheese.

On top of that, we're going to add our bodega

sauce, which you could kind of think of as like a Big Mac sauce.

Ketchup, mayo, mustard, and dill pickle hache.

We're going to add our sliced tomatoes.

The tomato, we want to slice it thin so that it's not overpowering the sandwich.

And on top of that, we're going to add our shredded iceberg lettuce.

And then this is going to get wrapped.

All right, so we got another order in.

This is going to be our spicy cutlet sandwich.

So, first thing I'm going to do is weigh out our chicken.

It's going to go into the fryer.

Our chicken cutlet, it's marinated

anywhere from 12 to 24 hours

in buttermilk and spices.

And then from there, it goes directly into panko.

And it just eliminates

one of the processes that you would typically need in order to make cutlets.

So, in a bowl, we're going to get our spicy vodka sauce,

get a scoop of our hot peppers, and fresh mozzarella.

cutlet is going to go directly into the vodka sauce, peppers, and mozzarella.

This is all going to get mixed together.

Again, we just want to make sure that you're getting a little bit of

everything in each bite.

So, we pre-dice the cutlet.

I feel like whenever I have a cutlet sandwich,

sauce is falling out, the cutlets are falling out.

So, we're trying to eliminate that for the guest here.

And then on top of our cutlet,

we're going to place some fresh basil.

And that'll get wrapped. All right. So, it's 11:15.

Customers are going to start to funnel in the door.

So, I think from this point, we're going to put our heads down and

try to knock out the lunch rush.

You want to expo today?

Arando is going to be running expo station.

So, whenever he's passing me down a sandwich, he's going to tell me what it is.

I'm going to initial the sandwich.

Up here we have a little cheat sheet of what initials on each sandwich should look like.

Diana, do you have the turkey club wrap? No bacon.

We're typically listening to music in here.

I have this salsa playlist that's banging

loud but controlled loud.

Can I get two more mac salads

separate bags and then a pickle

in a bag with one of those?

If the order is a delivery order

and the bag's ready to get stapled,

I'm putting that ticket up here versus

putting it underneath the bag, that's for walk-in customers.

But that's the sign that, you know, everything's in the bag.

It's ready to go.

What we're doing with our hot sandwiches

is I'm going to label it.

I'm going to put the ticket number on so that it can't get confused.

And this we're going to hold in our warming drawer.

When the delivery driver comes,

we can pass the sandwich on, but that way it stays hot for as long as possible.

In the winter time, 40 45%

of our business can be delivery.

Whereas in the summer when people are walking around,

it might be 25 30%.

All right, the lunch rush is over.

I still have a few more things to complete before the day is over.

So, I got to get back to it.

Thank you guys for your time.

You guys don't got to go home, but you got to get the hell out of