Vegan creation causes a stir
Whole Foods’ TTLA sandwich reaches celebrity status after video goes viral
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Anyone can get their hands on the latest buzzy food craze: You just walk up to the deli at a Whole Foods, tell them you want “that TTLA sandwich” and pay $8 at the cash register.
That is, unless the deli is out of the ingredients, particularly the vegan tempeh “bacon” strips that are stuffed into the sandwich. (This vegan riff on a BLT also has tomato, lettuce and avocado).
Between a viral video (vegan actress Tabitha Brown singing and having an apparent religious experience) and the Twitter/ Instagram/Facebook-friendly #TTLA hash tag, the nation is apparently experiencing shortages of tempeh bacon.
The whole thing started in January after Brown ordered the sandwich at a Whole Foods in California. It took off, helped along by people posting about the #TTLA Challenge.
At my local Whole Foods in Charlotte, there’s been such a run on the Smoky TTLA Sandwich that it took me more than a week to actually find it in stock.
“People come in all day long,” one clerk said. “We ran out of tempeh bacon.”
The shortage seems to have spread. “At the moment, we’re having an issue getting the
product needed for it, the tempeh,” said a kitchen manager at the Chattanooga Whole Foods, who asked not to be identified.
As options, he recommended the local favorite, the Chatt Town Club, made with turkey, bacon, garlic aioli, tomato, avocado and Swiss cheese, or, for vegans, the Spinach Pesto Portobello.
So after all the fuss, what’s the TTLA like? Charlotte’s version didn’t have all the dark leafy greens (or the pickle) that Tabitha Brown got. But it did have a generous stack of seven slices of tempeh bacon (that may explain why it runs out so fast), a pile of shredded lettuce, a generous slathering of roasted garlic Vegenaise (that ghostly white vegetarian mayonnaise), two slices of tomato, six or seven thin slices of avocado and a salt/pepper mix on ciabatta bread.
About that tempeh bacon: Let’s be generous and call it “bacon-ish.” To a non-vegan, it tastes like what bacon would taste like if pigs were made of cardboard. So the sandwich misses that essential soft-tomato/crispy bacon fat-and-salt hit of a real BLT.
Still, there’s enough gushiness from the avocado and the Vegenaise (note to self: get the roasted garlic flavor) to give the whole thing plenty of flavor, especially with the crusty ciabatta adding some crunch to offset the weirdly mushy tempeh slices.
Verdict: Roasted Garlic Vegennaise, avocado, tomato and lettuce makes a really good sandwich. But hold the fake bacon.
Staff writer Lisa Denton contributed to this story.