Our viral lunch
otherwise known as the story of our fucked up sandwich
Hi, clowns!
Davida and I took a short vacation last weekend, which means I wasn’t planning on writing a ton this week. (Sorry.) We went to Wisconsin and stayed in a beautiful cabin in the woods, which was about as restorative as you’d imagine. There was hiking, live music, visits to her family, evenings around a fire pit, and we even went out to eat a few times. The cabin was even remote enough that we didn’t have cell service, which was a little hard to get used to in the beginning, but then it became absolutely refreshing.
Here’s a few vacation photos, which I’m sure will bore the shit out of you.
One day, Davida and I had our sights set on a place for lunch. We’d already scoped out the menu and it looked very promising. It was gorgeous out, we had just done a bunch of walking around the forest, plus, we were on vacation. Might as well treat ourselves to something nice.
We managed to snag a spot at the place in time for a meal, and though the menu was slightly different in person, everything on it still looked great. When we were deciding what to get, Davida noticed that this place had an Italian beef sandwich, which many of you probably know is a Chicago specialty, most recently made famous by a TV show called The Bear. (Which we loved.)
Normally we’d get something more local, but the fact that it was on the menu had piqued my curiosity as well. A taste of home couldn’t hurt, right? I said fuck it, and tacked it onto our order.
The sandwich pictured here is more or less the platonic version of an Italian beef, which is simply a hot roast beef sandwich that’s sometimes drenched in cooking juices from the meat, adorned with hot or sweet (aka bell) peppers, and optionally, cheese.
This is not what we got.
[The sandwich above is from a place by my office called The Original Mr. Beef, which is what the restaurant in the aforementioned show The Bear is modeled after. It’s a pretty wonderful sandwich.]
Davida and I waited, enjoyed the scenery for a short while, and soon our food came out. Everything looked great. Until we received the Italian beef, that is. Once all employees were out of earshot, I said, “Oh no.”
Davida looked at the sandwich and her shoulders started shaking from quiet laughter.
Behold, clowns.
Look at it. Just look at it. I’ll give you a few minutes. Maybe a couple of years. Come back when you’re ready.
My original reaction was that we’d simply received the wrong order (and later Davida said she’d thought the same thing). But I was incorrect. Upon further, much deeper inspection, we realized that this unidentifiable congealed tube of what appeared to be pure fat nestled in a French roll, was indeed our Italian beef sandwich.
If you inspect the photo carefully, you can see some of the beef nearly at the surface of what ended up being a thick shell of cheese. Due to my long stint as a pizzamaker, I have an intimate and professional connection to melted mozzarella. Never in my experience had I witnessed cheese with these visual properties. The beef was sort of like Han Solo in carbonite, but like, sadder. I immediately whipped out my phone to take a photo, barely able to speak proper English.
“I can’t wait to put this up on Twitter,” I whispered. Too bad I still didn’t have cell reception.
Once the shock had settled, we both took a curious bite, and sure enough, there was a compacted quantity of tender meat beneath that leathery cheese shell. What was even more unusual is that the filling was actually still pretty warm (hot, even), but the cheese had lost its stretchiness somehow, so we were essentially biting through a sort of dairy gel. Life is truly a marvelous place.
Don’t get me wrong, it still tasted pretty good, and like an Italian beef was supposed to. But we will never get over the way it looked. The rest of the food was decent, maybe a little weird, but not like that sandwich.
After we recovered from the shock of lunch, we made it over to a more populated area where I eventually got cell service. I posted the photo of the Italian beef on Twitter and we took another long stroll by the lakefront without thinking about it too much, though the both of us would bust out laughing occasionally while muttering about it.
I checked on the tweet later and noticed it was getting an unusual amount of attention. That’s not saying much, since I usually post dumb shit like asking golf ball brands if I could launch their products up my ass while everyone else generally ignores me.
We eventually returned to the cabin where we drank some hard seltzer, watched Scarface, and I made a really fancy dinner of frozen pizza, grilled shrimp, and salad. Wild, I know. My spotty reception made it difficult for me to check Twitter and eventually we hit the bed.
The next morning it was time to mosey back on to Chicago. While I was driving, I asked Davida to check on the tweet to see if anything interesting had happened.
It turns out that yes, something interesting did happen.
People apparently had strong feelings about our lunch, because the responses were hilarious. Many people didn’t bother reading the caption and simply asked what was in the sandwich. Others assumed it was some form of tamale in a bun, while others speculated that it was polenta or cookie dough (?!). There was a lot of denial that it was Italian beef, however.
One person replied in solidarity with an equally impressive photo of what appeared to be either a mangled fried chicken patty or a meteorite on a bun that they had been served once.
The tweet has since slowed down now. It’s at just over 18.5k likes, which is by far the most attention I’ve ever gotten on anything via social media. I’m going to be honest; I felt a little like a rat mashing on a button directly wired to its brain’s reward system, when I saw the interactions rolling in.
But nothing will be as rewarding as our memory of that beautiful congealed tube of cheese and beef from that late summer day. And the eventual disbelief that a photo of our lunch went viral. Food doesn’t get any stupider than that.
By the way, I’m not telling any of you where we got it. A secret spot like that, are you kidding me? We’re keeping this one for ourselves.
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What I AM hoping to learn is where the cabin was. I'm always looking for good options for weekend-off-the-grid type places, especially ones that are closer to Chicago than, say, Door County.
Noooooo! What is this madness? That looks VILE!