San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Yelp is right — and that’s guaranteed
Philly cheesesteak could justify its ranking
Every sandwich at Gino’s Deli inside the Stop N Buy convenience store at Huebner and Lockhill Selma roads comes with a promise from owner Aleem Chaudhry.
“If you don’t like your sandwich, you don’t have to pay for it,” he says.
How often has that happened? Four times in the past six years that he can recall, Chaudhry said, a drop in the bucket for the thousands and thousands of sandwiches he’s sold since he bought Gino’s and the Stop N Buy from its previous owner in 2006.
Over the years, the corner shop has become less and less of a gas station and convenience store — the pumps went away six years ago — and more of a sandwich destination, fueled in part by the algorithms that ranked Gino’s among Yelp’s top five restaurants in Texas and the top 100 in the United States.
Running Gino’s seemed predestined for Chaudhry, who’s been cooking since he was 9 years old and learned his sandwich skills working at a grocery store and deli in Brooklyn called, as fate would have it, Gino’s.
Best sandwich: Of the 22 sandwiches on the menu, from cold cuts and tuna salad to burgers and hot hoagies, the Philly cheesesteak ($12.49) is by far the bestseller, accounting for 85 to 90 percent of his business, Chaudhry said. The first bite told me why: It’s a
cheesy, melty, sweet and beefy stir-fry of lean rib-eye, smoked provolone cheese, and grilled onions and peppers finished with lettuce, tomato and grilled jalapeños.
Like all of Gino’s sandwiches, the bread is a long, torpedo-shaped roll that starts soft and gets softer in a tight wrap of foil and butcher paper, but it holds together with the limber tensile strength of a proper hoagie. Chaudhry gets his bread from Uwe’s Bakery & Deli in New Braunfels, calling it the best sandwich bread he’s ever had outside of a trip to Amsterdam.
Other sandwiches: The cheesesteak’s also available with chicken ($11.99), turning it
into more of a Southwestern experience than a Northeastern one, with the milder white meat leaving room for the peppers and onions to take control.
Everything wrestled for control in the Smoke Stack ($10.49), a battle royale of smokiness brought on by smoked turkey, smoked bacon, smoked provolone and smoked chipotle aioli. That’s maybe one more degree of smoke than I needed, but I can’t say the name didn’t prepare me for the campfire convention.
On the cool side, Gino’s built a balanced Italian sub ($9.99) stacked with ham, salami and provolone turbocharged by a layer of pepperoni through the center, a sandwich with the perfect ratio of meat, bread and cheese.
As I wavered between chicken salad and tuna salad, Chaudhry broke the tie with a taste of each, offered on plastic spoons. Sweetened with crushed pineapple, the chicken salad was good, but the mellow yellow tuna salad ($8.99) won with a simple and confident blend of albacore, mayo, light mustard and relish.
Keeping Chaudhry’s guarantee in mind, I paid for each and every sandwich that day.