An ode to Antone’s po’boy
Antone’s is celebrating its 55th anniversary this week, and to commemorate its 1962 founding, it’s selling its iconic Houston sandwich — the Original Po’ Boy — for just 55 cents.
That’s a song, considering that the price of what used to be one of the city’s most affordable treats has risen to $5.95 over the decades, from what I remember as about a buck in the mid-1960s, when this mildmannered stack of wafer-thin meats and cheese first turned my head.
There are a couple of catches.
The 55-cent deal applies only from 1 to 3 p.m. through Sunday. It’s available only at Antone’s sit-down locations at 4520 San Felipe and 2724 West T.C. Jester, plus the grab-and-go kiosks in the downtown tunnels and underneath Greenway Plaza, so don’t go into your grocery store and expect a sale on the sandwiches there. There’s a limit of four po’ boys per customer per visit.
Special prices on other sandwiches apply, too, but it’s the 55-cent Original bargain that captures my imagination because that sandwich played a role in my coming of age in this city.
I figure I ate my first Antone’s Po’ Boy in 1966, a year after I arrived in Houston to attend Rice University. Like most of my friends, I had a very limited budget. We couldn’t spend much on the few occasions we kicked over the traces of dorm food and ventured beyond the university’s hedges.
Bill Williams’ fried chicken was an extravagance. So was a cheap steak at the Far East Frontier, a Texas-Chinese hybrid east of campus.
But an Antone’s Po’ Boy was something I could afford. The long, cylindrical packages — then as now swaddled in white paper — flew off an assembly line run by wisecracking women at the Taft Street grocery store. It was founded by Jalal Antone to cater primarily to the local Syrian and Lebanese community, but the po’ boys made it a mecca for Houstonians of all stripes. The line that formed at noon in front of the sandwich counter was one of the most democratic dining experiences I had encountered in the newly integrated city.
To my impressionable 19-year-old brain, the rambling Antone’s space was an exotic wonderland, chockablock with foodstuffs from the Middle East and beyond, festooned with sausages and crammed with cheeses I’d never heard of. After perching on an upturned pickle barrel to eat my sandwich, I’d browse the shelves with as much intensity as I would pay to a museum exhibit. In a city where steakhouses, seafood palaces and Italian-American spots ruled the dining scene, Antone’s pointed the way to a wider world.
The po’ boy itself, though, was pure Houston, and so it has remained during the five decades I’ve enjoyed it. Playing off the archetypes of the New Orleans po’ boy and the East Coast Italian-American sub, the sandwich’s slather of mayonnaise and sweettart chow chow added a distinctly Southern note, suited to a tea party under the magnolia trees.
The custom rolls — then as now made by Houston’s Royal Bakery —were soft and slightly chewy, with none of the crusty, shattery snap crucial to a New Orleans po’ boy. Instead of the brisk oil-and-vinegar dressing that sets off a classic East Coast sub, the mayonnaise used by Antone’s imparted a certain buttery softness that was echoed by the interior bundle of mild, soft meats and cheese. Only a scatter of dill pickle slices broke the dominant impression of gentleness with their sharp crunch.
Then, as now, I could not rise in court to vigorously defend the ham and salami involved. They have always fallen more in the midcentury American genre of “cold cuts” than in that of obstreperous, texturally interesting Old World salumi.
Yet somehow the salty, thinly shaved ham and the pale-pink salami rounds, freckled with plenty of white fat, worked in their Antone’s Po’ Boy context, especially against the nutty twinge of provolone cheese. Invariably, I finished one with the satisfaction that comes instinctively with the sense of “getting enough protein.”
Careful, though, about too much protein: I have always maintained that the Original Po’ Boy (once called the “Regular”) was the way to go since the more expensive “Super” version, which doubles the meats and cheese, alters the balance of flavors too much. With the proportions skewed, the particular sandwich magic flees.
In the end, after a lifetime of sandwich connoisseurship, I may crave a formidable New Orleans po’ boy sandwich more, or yearn more fiercely for a New Jersey sub dripping with spicy capicola and tart oil and vinegar. But the Antone’s Po’ Boy comforts me in a way its swaggery cousins can’t. It has seen me through thick and thin, fat times and lean, picnics and parties, study sessions and deadlines. It’s hardly changed a bit, except for the price, which means I can still taste my long, complicated relationship with Houston in every bite.
So go get one this week, while they’re 55 cents each. That’s not much for a piece of Houston history. And here’s a tip: Don’t rip the wrapper off in the car when you pluck the supremely portable po’ boy from its home in Antone’s refrigerator case. Take it home. Wait until an hour has passed.
Then bite. With the chill shed and the textures at their softest and most buttery, the piquant red chow chow leaping through, you will have arrived at Peak Antone’s Original. It’s a profoundly Houstonian condition.