Now the Greatest Sandwich Outlets in America Are Going Superb Eating

Lingua Franca sits alongside the Los Angeles River. It’s one of many hottest tables in LA, providing views of wildlife alongside elegant salads, beef cheeks braised in root beer, and heaps of matchstick fries. Bringing a complicated and enjoyable contact to easy meals isn’t new to homeowners Peter and Lauren Lemos, although. Blocks away from the restaurant sits the transport container that launched the group’s Wax Paper, which since its opening in 2015 has grow to be a favourite takeout spot for creative, high quality sandwiches. Lingua Franca is sort of an extension of Wax Paper, however as a extra formidable, sit-down restaurant. The latter couldn’t exist with out the previous.

After discovering a following with their sandwich outlets and informal lunch counters, restaurateurs and cooks across the nation at the moment are opening full-fledged, and in some circumstances, extra formal eating places: Wax Paper opened the “new Californian” Lingua Franca. The group behind New Orleans’s Turkey and the Wolf, recognized for its fried bologna sandwiches and good vibes, has opened Hungry Eyes, a full-service, ’80s-themed restaurant with cocktails. Italian hoagie slingers Grazie Grazie in DC begat Grazie Nonna, serving red-sauce classics underneath chandeliers. In New York Metropolis, there’s the HiHi Room, a restaurant dedicated to the flavors of the Mid-Atlantic from enjoyable sandwich godfathers Court docket Road Grocers, and the group behind Spiral Diner in Fort Price, Texas is opening Maiden, a vegan tasting menu spot.

5 or so years in the past, for a lot of restaurateurs, opening a sandwich store was a technique to deliver enjoyable and creativity to their work. In line with Mason Hereford, when he, Colleen Quarls, Nathan Barfield, and the remainder of the group opened Turkey and the Wolf in 2016, every of them had not too long ago been a sous chef at a higher-end restaurant. “Turkey and the Wolf was our means of getting away from all of the issues that we had been doing for years … We sort of wished to attempt to not solely work much less hours, however do it our means.”

Wonho Frank Lee/Eater LA

Opening a restaurant is rarely simple, however opening an informal place is commonly a lower-cost means for restaurateurs to ascertain themselves. Wax Paper allowed Peter and Lauren Lemos to deliver the abilities they discovered in nice eating kitchens to a venue with a lower cost level. It was additionally “a means for us to get our title on the market and begin to create one thing that individuals knew us for,” Peter Lemos says, as an alternative of toiling away behind the scenes.

When Amy McNutt opened Spiral Diner, a vegan diner and bakery in Fort Price, in 2002, a lunch counter was a decrease carry than a extra formal area. “It felt like one of the best ways to introduce a Texas crowd to vegan eating was by making it a diner, making it very acquainted and cozy, one thing that wasn’t going to freak anyone out an excessive amount of,” she says.

However now, diners are more and more fascinated by experiences, whether or not that’s nonetheless a response to lockdown confinement or as a result of TikTok has put a renewed focus on visiting eating places for the vibes. “I feel individuals are in search of perhaps one thing just a little bit extra particular and just a little bit extra elevated. And meals is such an enormous a part of folks’s lives too … the shopper’s expectations are a lot extra elevated,” says Peter Lemos.

With their sit-down restaurant Grazie Nonna, Casey Patten and Gerald Addison “talked a couple of idea the place lots of the core philosophies from fast service sandwich outlets in the end apply,” Patten says. “How can we construct one thing that’s informal however enjoyable?” Patten had already discovered success with sandwich store Grazie Grazie, and in response to Addison, the aim was to get folks to make Grazie Nonna their weekly common spot in simply the identical means a sandwich place could be. That led to a stability of the informal and upscale — Italian consolation classics, served with cocktails and romantic lighting.

Rey Lopez/Eater DC

For McNutt, the success of Spiral Diner additionally helped prime her group for a nice eating vegan expertise. “We’re undoubtedly not the one [vegan] place anymore, which was our aim,” she says. And now that she not has to coach diners on the fundamentals of veganism, McNutt can get extra creative. “[At Maiden] we are able to actually take our time not solely creating the recipes, however within the presentation and plating and preparation. I hold joking that it’s grown up Spiral, as a result of I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I’ve grown up, and that is simply one thing that I discover there’s a necessity for.”

Principally, these cooks are reapproaching nice eating with new eyes. In line with Hereford, Turkey and the Wolf chef Phil Cenac wished to increase into dinner service at a better value level, and whereas first the group took their nice eating expertise and utilized them to stuffed sandwiches, now the reverse is going on at Hungry Eyes. “We took a few of these concepts about what you may get away with in irreverence and enjoyable, and tried to reapply them to these components and types of service that we had been working in years prior,” Hereford says. “We would like to have the ability to use those self same components like candy breads or uncooked beef for tartare, however we nonetheless wish to serve one thing that’s altogether playful and makes you smile.”

That is the way it needs to be. As extra folks than ever perceive, there is no such thing as a a technique for meals service to look, nobody customary of high quality. There are classes to be discovered in each nook of the business. The subsequent time you sit down for dinner, you may suppose to your self, perhaps this was all impressed by an awesome sandwich.