Pittsburg digs a sandwich stuffed with … fries
Ottawa has its Beaver-Tails. In Buffalo, it’s wings. Philadelphia is home to the cheesesteak, while Chicago claims deep-dish pizza. Pittsburgh, meanwhile, is celebrated for a few different foods, including everything bearing the Heinz name, perogies, and McDonald’s Big Mac — invented here in 1967.
But if you ask locals for the iconic dietary staple of the Steel City, they almost invariably mention the sandwiches from Primanti Bros. restaurant, which are made with thick Italian bread, grilled meat (roast beef, salami, baloney, ham, kielbasa, bacon, etc.), provolone, coleslaw, tomato and — wait for it — french fries.
Last year, to honour the Penguins’ third line of Carl Hagelin, Nick Bonino and Phil Kessel, Primanti’s offered an HBK Sandwich, featuring ham, bacon and kielbasa. This year, it’s the Captain’s Sandwich, named for the Pens’ Sidney Crosby, with roast beef, capicolla and turkey (what, no chicken?).
These days, the restaurant boasts 33 locations, including one at each of the city’s three main sports venues, but the first one is still going strong 84 years after it opened on 18th Street in what is now the popular Strip District. According to manager Toni Hagerty, who’s been with the restaurant for the past 43 years, it was initially a truck stop diner favoured by the long-haul drivers delivering fruit and vegetables to area vendors.
“It’s been here since 1933,” she says. “This was a produce yard, so they’d bring the produce from California and Florida, and there was a sandwich for the truck drivers — a full-course meal on a sandwich, so when they’d drive they could eat this one big sandwich.”
Soon after the restaurant opened, she adds, a truck driver came in one day and said he had a load of potatoes he couldn’t sell, and offered to give it to owner Joe Primanti.
“He said, ‘What am I going to do with them?’ and the driver said ‘Put ‘em on a sandwich!’ And that’s the way it started.”
The sandwich eventually spawned what’s known as the Pittsburgh Salad — a salad with fries — which Primanti’s doesn’t sell but which is popular elsewhere in the city.
Primanti’s, which is open 24 hours a day and thus an afterhours destination for the bar-hopping crowd, goes through between 600 and 700 pounds of potatoes each day.