If you do a regular blog post about sandwiches, you will frequently hear from people telling you to try Primanti Bros. in Pittsburgh, or that the sandwich you just ate is a ripoff of something Primanti Bros. has been doing for years. Also, if you do a regular blog post about sandwiches, you probably regularly hear from your parents wanting to know what on earth you went to college for.
Primanti Bros. puts fries and coleslaw on all of its sandwiches. We ordered The Pitts-burger. It's a beef patty, tomatoes, lettuce, plus the french fries and cole slaw, on white bread.
Kelsie: Picking this sandwich up, it feels like I just did curls at the gym, except this sandwich is the opposite of exercise.
Eva: If my fries count as a topping, does that mean I can still order fries as a side?
Robert: It's thoughtful that they provide the sandwich, fries and coleslaw courses all in one package, since I probably won't live long enough to eat them separately.
Miles: The texture is interesting. Was the sandwich assembled by a mama bird?
Eva: The Primanti Brothers are the Wright Brothers of Pittsburgh — except their sandwiches are responsible for several planes never getting off the ground.
Ian: I look at this thing stuffed with fries and cheese and realize it looks at me and sees the same thing.
Miles: It's so dense. It's like they were trying to turn the sandwich into a diamond.
Ian: This is the kind of thing you just eat when you're drunk. And if you're really drunk, you send it a text at 2 a.m. telling it you think you should get back together.
[The verdict: We'd been looking forward to this one for a long time, but we all came away a little disappointed. The starchiness of the fries overwhelmed everything else. We respect Primanti Bros. as an innovator, but we've enjoyed the knockoffs more.]
Sandwich Monday is a satirical feature from the humorists at Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
