A New Crop of Unapologetic Sandwiches

I’ve been worried, a little, that Unapologetic Foods was going soft. Over the past decade or so, the restaurant group more or less detonated the New York dining scene with Adda, Dhamaka, and Semma, whose undiluted, unwhitewashed takes on Indian cuisine—brains, offal, flaming spice—were a jolt to the city’s sleepy South Asian culinary landscape. Today, the restaurants are still stellar, still brash, still pace-setting, but the past year or two have brought some small, subtle shifts—little concessions, maybe, to the normative American palate. Sure, Dhamaka still serves goat testicles and kidneys, but the once boldly presented brains at Adda are now tucked inside an obscuringly creamy egg custard. Most dismaying to me was the group’s seemingly endless tinkering with the menu at Rowdy Rooster, its fast-casual fried-chicken spot, including a downgrade in the chicken’s range of heat. Where, once, there was a one-to-five scale of spiciness, in which three was already deep in the red zone and five verged on biohazard, there’s now a chirpy scaled-down rubric whose upper limit offers, roughly, the soothing warmth of an electric heating pad.

The original Rowdy Rooster, a slim storefront on a scrappy East Village block, closed earlier this year, menu fiddling notwithstanding. (One location survives, on a charmless stretch near Penn Station.) In its place is Sanwits, the group’s latest, a sandwich shop overseen by Eric Valdez, who was the chef de cuisine of Dhamaka before becoming the chef-partner of the Filipino restaurant Naks, the group’s other non-Indian outpost. Sanwits is Filipino, too—the name is a Tagalog gloss on the word “sandwich”—despite the fact that, as Valdez told me on the phone recently, the Philippines, where he grew up, doesn’t really have a sandwich culture to speak of. This is, unapologetically, exciting: with no inherited form to honor or betray, Valdez has room to do, more or less, whatever he wants, and the menu is a glorious mashup of recognizable American sandwich silhouettes and frank, unhedged Filipino ingredients.

The sandwiches are messy, oozing, saucy, and insistent. This works out fine if you snag one of the itsy-bitsy restaurant’s four tables, less so if you’re taking your meal a block east to a bench in Tompkins Square Park, or just leaning against a bike rack on the sidewalk, where you’ll do a fair amount of dripping and glopping for your trouble. But what the sandwiches lack in structural integrity they make up in sheer brain-exploding flavor. A riff on the French dip is built on lechón—Valdez braises the pork belly in pineapple juice and soy sauce, then shreds it into fatty hunks aromatic with spice. The meat arrives on a hero roll slicked with “Vienna-sausage mayonnaise” (the sausages are deep-fried, then blitzed into an emulsion), with a cup of the meat’s brothy drippings on the side for dunking. A take on a cheesesteak, onions and peppers and all, draws on calderata, a Filipino beef stew thickened and complicated with a bit of liver. Thin slices of tender rib eye are piled on a torpedo roll, dressed in a sauce that harnesses everything sweet and funky about the original stew, and densified with gloriously creamy, melty Eden cheese, a Velveeta-like processed product specific to the Philippines.

The most exciting thing on the menu, though, is a sandwich that Valdez makes with his house-made “spam.” In flavor, the spam is a strikingly faithful re-creation of canned luncheon meat, salty and gently spiced, but the texture is softer and chewier than the brand name’s springy, sodium-nitrate-cured bounce. (Valdez skips the curing that goes into real Spam, instead simply steaming his well-spiced loaf of ground butt and ground belly; the result is a rich brown, rather than fairy-tale pink.) Seared slices of the spam, dipped and wrapped in a blanket of egg, are piled on thick toasted white bread along with a handful of shredded lettuce, and a big smear of secret sauce—your standard mayo-mustard-ketchup blend, though Valdez uses Filipino banana ketchup—that leaves the whole thing tasting, very pleasurably, like a Big Mac on a bender. A hint of Rowdy Rooster survives in the fried-chicken sandwich, whose battered chicken thigh is exactly as crackling as it was out of the previous establishment’s fryer. This one lands on a tidy round of brioche, spread with smoky eggplant purée and a funky, faintly pink sauce built on fermented shrimp.

Then there are the vinegar fries. “These are sick, just get ’em” is all the menu offers by way of explanation, and it’s advice worth taking. They’re tossed in a blend of malt-vinegar powder, sugar, salt, black pepper, and MSG, a miraculous combination that activates every sensory receptor simultaneously, and nearly blows out your palate for anything else. Other sides include lumpiang shanghai, Filipino spring rolls stuffed with spiced ground pork, served with a neon-red chile sauce for dipping, and a mac and cheese studded with sliced hot dogs and ground beef, doused in sweet, ketchupy Filipino spaghetti sauce. The sides, like the sandwiches, are relentless in their richness—a bit of roasted-pineapple relish on the lechón dip lands about as forcefully as a Nerf dart against a howitzer. Relief comes only from the soft drinks—a tart, honey-kissed calamansi fizz, for instance, a small mercy on a sweltering afternoon—or the lone dessert, a halo-halo parfait layered with shaved ice, orchid-purple ube, and squishy stewed plantain, gold as sunrise.

The menu at Sanwits is tight, and seems to be ever-tightening: since opening, the restaurant has dropped a few sandwiches from its offerings, including fried mackerel and a chewy, gloriously savory mushroom adobo. (Valdez told me that his goal is to slim the lineup down to just four sandwiches: all hits, no skips.) I miss the foregone items—especially the mackerel, which I never got the chance to try—but this is what tends to happen at any adventurous restaurant: it opens, it waves its flag around, and then it starts to settle in. Like Dhamaka and Adda before it, Naks, too, has changed in the years since its launch: what was once a tasting-menu-style kamayan is now a more casual brasserie, and the place is very much the better for it. Maybe Sanwits will go the same route, moving away from challenging choices and toward pleasing the masses, and maybe that will turn out to suit Valdez—and all of us—just fine. Right now, though, I like it just as it is. ♦