Why I'm Voting for This Pastrami Sandwich
The case for Thea Bakery's pastrami sandwich, plus thoughts on the Harris-Trump presidential election, and a quick take on the porky gordita at Ramirez!
Election Day Special: We’re discounting annual subscriptions by 21 percent thru tomorrow night — gigantic savings over the monthly rate! Scroll down for a paywalled take on one of the city’s best new pastrami sandwiches.
It’s a heck of a time to be writing about splurge dining.
Like most folks, I’m more concerned about the fate of our democracy than the state of blowout omakases. On the other hand, I’m also quite aware that I’ve spent too much time hitting refresh on polling data.
And indeed, we all have different political beliefs. I come from a big extended family of Trump supporters and Kamala supporters and we all love each other immensely, even if conversations at the dinner table can get tricky.
It’s okay. I’m a grad school journalism professor. I like tricky conversations.
But on this monumental election day, I figured you might like to spend a few minutes with me daydreaming about some good pork and pastrami.
Just do me a favor, will ya? Vote.
Our election turnout is historically low. Surely, we can agree on this.
Even for the Trump-Biden race, when folks came out in historic numbers amid the pandemic, just 63 percent of the voting age population cast their ballots. That’s well below what you’ll find in Mexico, South Korea, Brazil, Peru, and Argentina, according to Pew Research. Election day is a holiday in a few of those countries — so you don’t have to ask your boss if you can leave work early — but here’s hoping that the surge in early voting in New York and other states made things easier. We’ll see.
For now, enjoy this dose of culinary escapism below.
But first read some quality journalism or essays, like Margaret Sullivan on newspaper endorsements, or Fareed Zakaria’s 1997 essay on the Rise of Illiberal Democracy. And after you read, vote. Encourage others to vote. Ask your friends if they’ve voted and ask your family members if they need help getting to their polling places. Regardless of whom they support. You won’t just be doing a good thing for democracy, you might also make an aunt or a cousin feel a little less lonely.
As a journalist, even one who frequently authors opinion pieces, endorsing a particular candidate isn’t really my “particular brand of vodka,” to borrow a phrase from my buddy Danny O (great guy).
Heck, even as a restaurant critic I try to avoid the reductive: Eat here, don’t eat there, at least in a formal review. Okay, I realize that’s precisely what I do in most of my lists and guides, lol. But maybe this is the better frame of reference: Selling a restaurant is never best practice for food journalism. That’s the job of a chef. The job of a critic is to think out loud, to contextualize, to wrestle with competing truths. And to nudge things in one or other direction.
Though sometimes, it’s more than a nudge.
You could argue this particular election deserves more than a nudge. But again, as someone who grew up on Long Island with a family of strongly minded Republicans and Democrats, I know that getting folks to change their minds is more complicated than explaining why they should reconsider J.G. Melon (not an easy task either, judging how certain folks reacted to my review, lol).
And indeed, one of the things you learn after a few decades of opinion writing (and being a nephew) is that listening, and reminding everyone how delicious their cooking is, is often a much handier skill that persuading.
One more thing: As a critic, I sometimes find that arguments are more elegant when they’re scattered and decompressed. When you give folks the tools to connect the dots themselves, sometimes years later.
Even in an acerbic Pete Wells missive like the Guy Fieri column, the line that resonates with me the most isn’t that quip about Donkey Sauce, but rather the bit about whether the Mountain Dew-haired chef was TV’s answer to Calvin Trillin, with his loving odes to unfancy places on “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.” The critic, of course, also wondered this: “Is it all an act? Is that why the kind of cooking you celebrate on television is treated with so little respect at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar?”
You could deride those points as academic. I’d say it’s good storytelling, an effort to insert a dose of cultural heft amid all the countless barbs about the food. It’s an angle to help loving fans of a national TV personality and businessman reframe their understanding of him. An eternal narrative.
Just the same, I don’t remember every single detail in the Zakaria Democracy piece that they made us read too many times at Columbia. But it felt incredible when one of the author’s implications crept up on me the other day: How modern authoritarian regimes cement their power not necessarily through violent coups, but via more blandly nefarious means: through elections.
For me, that observation helps tie together all the countless barbs about a certain ex-president, examples so ludicrous they’re almost hard to believe. About how he’s an ill-tempered man who incited a riot against the Capitol. A TV personality who has used violent rhetoric against the news media and his political opponents. A commander-in-chief who speaks admiringly of authoritarian leaders and derisively of fallen service members. An individual whose racist remarks about immigrants — especially those from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa — align with his nativist views and proposed mass deportation policies.
A guy who has a very specific idea about Mexican food.
Now the good news is that the antidote is simple: voting. That can be tricky in countries without a whole lot of political competition. But stateside, we still have things reasonably easy in this regard.
So go read some good journalism. Then go cast your ballot. Because the only thing standing between our constitutional democracy — and a populist movement whose leaders have a track record of undermining our most sacred institutions, including the electoral process — will be just a few thousand votes.
Afterward, we can all get our talking points ready for the Thanksgiving dinner table :) Yes, things are going to get weird for all of us in the coming weeks and months, no matter what happens. But I promise you this: We’ll get through it together. I know it.
And I’ll give J.G. Melon another shot. Don’t hate me for my pre-pandemic burger opinions, lol.
Past the Paywall: Where to try New York’s Next Great Pastrami Sandwich
And what you need to know about the porky gorditas at Carnitas Ramirez
You’ve probably seen my New Wave Pizza Guide. In an ideal world, I’d make a similar list for New School pastrami sandwiches, updated riffs on the quintessential foodstuff.
Then again, that list would short. I can only count three entrants at the moment:
The lunch-sized pastrami sandwich at S&P
The barbecue-style pastrami at Hometown in Red Hook
The Mediterranean-leaning pastrami from Thea Bakery
My favorite at the moment is the Thea sandwich. Let me tell you about it.