Sandwich of the Week

There’s so much I want you to understand about my last few years before I tell you about this sandwich. But I urgently want to tell you about this sandwich, and I am not yet equipped to communicate the full experience of my last few years. It’ll have to seep through the seams for now. I was so sick. 

The sandwich

Seoul Meets Bagel from Between the Bagel on 30th Ave. in Astoria, N.Y.

The construction

Bulgogi beef, kimchi, gochujang mayo, egg and cheese on a whole wheat everything bagel. 

They asked if I wanted it toasted and I said no, because I already knew Between the Bagel to be an excellent bagel place and correctly assumed the bagel would be fresh. There’s a reasonable case for having it toasted. 

Important background information

I couldn’t eat without pain for nearly two full years. I lost about 50 pounds over a three-month stretch in the fall of 2020. I adjusted to new normal after new normal until I subsisted mostly on Boost and Rice Krispie Treats. I hate pity so much that I eluded empathy. I told almost no one. Former readers would sometimes send photos or descriptions of great sandwiches they recommended, and I’d reply cheerfully, and it felt like I was playing a role, pretending to be the person I was from 1981-2019, a guy who enjoyed sandwiches. 

I’m through it now, or at least between it. I felt better as soon as I woke up from surgery in June, less three feet of intestines and with a bunch of tubes coming out of my abdomen. I continued feeling better even after the tubes came out and the drugs wore off. I reintroduced real foods to my diet without incident. I developed a weird, Stockholm Syndrome-like appreciation for Rice Krispie Treats. 

And I moved, and now all of a sudden there’s a full-blown avalanche of new sandwiches I am excited to try. Last year at this time I would fret about how I’d manage to consume 1,500 calories in a day. Today I will struggle to limit myself to 3,000. What a weird thing. 

There are tables inside Between the Bagel, but I got this sandwich on an especially nice day, so I biked over to Astoria Park to eat it on a park bench. Astoria Park seems a bit out of the way even for most people who live in Astoria, and it’s an odd and lovely place. On the ground it’s quiet, but it sits in the shadow of the Triboro Bridge, and there’s a constant rumble from the traffic overhead. 

On the gorgeous day I visited, nearly everyone else in the park confined themselves to a small, artificial-turf athletic field in the center, most of them circling its perimeter on a bright blue running track. And it’s Queens, so it was almost every type of person imaginable: Joggers in gymwear, business-casual power-walkers, old dudes in khakis, young women in leggings and long overcoats, and so on, all moving counterclockwise, all at different speeds. 

What it looks like

How it tastes

You have to have it. You have to have it. You have to have it. 

This is not a sandwich. This is an immersive experience. This is art. 

It tastes exactly like nothing I’ve ever eaten before, but also sort of like everything I’ve ever eaten before, the salt and the spice and the rye and the ginger. Every bite kicks open new doors to the soul, unlocking synesthetic memories I had no idea I kept. It tastes like my old roommate’s family chili recipe. It tastes like diving headlong into a pile of leaves on a cool Autumn day. It tastes like a warm embrace. Like euphoria.

All the ingredients are good, but none is extraordinary: It’s a great bagel – a legit one, boiled and baked, soft on the inside and and a touch crispy on the outside like it should be – and the bulgogi beef is sweet and warm and tender with little fatty hints of chew, the gochujang mayo is as creamy and tangy and delicious as you expect any pinkish-orangish sauce to be, the kimchi packs the bitter flavor of collard greens with light fishy notes, and the eggs are eggs and the cheese is American cheese. It’s the synergy that sings. 

It’s huge. I sat there on the park bench and ate the whole damn thing, a laughable, liberating portion. And the people in the park walked and jogged and dashed, congealing into larger groups then thinning out into smaller factions by pace, undulating hypnotically. And the drone from the bridge became distinct and isolated, too distant to drown out the soft sounds of shuffling feet on the track, and it all felt too beautiful to handle. I cried a little. It’s a really fucking good sandwich.

What it costs: $11, plus, for the full experience, a whole lot of antecedent suffering. The guy at the counter gave me some rice balls while I waited, and the rice balls were also spectacular.

Hall of Fame? Big yes.

I remain torn on the notion of rating or ranking sandwiches from small businesses like this one. At this point, any sandwich I write about (unless explicitly noted) is a sandwich worth eating, and I don’t want to end any review of an interesting sandwich from a worthwhile purveyor on a negative note. In the case of the Seoul Meets Bagel, it doesn’t matter: This thing is an inner-circle Sandwich Hall of Famer. But from here on out, if I make no mention of the Hall of Fame on a sandwich review, just nod and know it’s a good sandwich that fell short of that celebrated benchmark.

(Note: The second photo is the Seoul Meets Bagel on a traditional everything bagel, not the whole wheat everything bagel reviewed here. I went back to get another one, but it was later in the day and they were out of whole wheat everything. It was still awesome, though this one felt like it would’ve been better toasted.)