San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
This sandwich shop’s muffulettas put taste over tradition
How Sandy’s in San Francisco makes a New Orleans classic (and breaks a few rules)
San Francisco now has what’s likely its first and only shop dedicated to muffulettas, the prized, meaty sandwich from New Orleans.
Peterson Harter, a New Orleans native who started slinging them as a pandemic pop-up, recently officially opened Sandy’s at 1457 Haight St., between Masonic Avenue and Ashbury Street.
Inside the small, bright shop, Harter has perfected his take on the muffuletta, a sandwich so enshrined in New Orleans culture that its ingredients and treatment spark fierce debate.
The muffuletta, which is believed to have been invented by a Sicilian immigrant in the early 20th century at Central Grocery Co. in New Orleans, has several distinct (and many would say, nonnegotiable) features. It’s served on a large, round loaf of bread dotted with sesame seeds. It’s stuffed with multiple kinds of Italian cold cuts — typically salami, ham and mortadella — topped with Swiss and provolone cheeses, then slathered with a green olive spread. There’s no mayo, and it’s not toasted (see: fierce debate).
Harter has charted his own, nontraditional muffuletta path in San Francisco. Customers will encounter a ridiculous amount of spicy kalamata olive salad, and only provolone cheese instead of the typical Swiss. There will be mayonnaise (though not just any mayo). And a vegetarian muffuletta with crispy cremini mushrooms and scallions has become a hit that sometimes outsells the original.
Sandy’s will also serve a sausage melt, as well as a pickled egg salad sandwich, with added crunch from Zapp’s potato chips. Specials down the line might include a Cajun-style lobster roll filled with blue crab gremolata.
There are a few tables and seats inside Sandy’s; Harter anticipates doing a lot of takeout given the shop’s proximity to Golden Gate Park. The round muffulettas, which are sliced into and sold by eighths, are on display in a glass case by the register, like pizza in a slice shop. The space is decorated with photographs of friends at New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival; a fiery, bright orange papier-mache sun that fell off a Mardi Gras float; and a framed 1979 advertisement for the New Orleans cooking school started by Harter’s mother, Lee Barnes, who inspired him to go into the food industry.
Before the pandemic, however, Harter had been working front-of-house at the Progress in San Francisco — and thinking about leaving restaurants for good. During shelter in place, he and his girlfriend, Moni Frailing, a cook at the Progress, started selling fresh bread, pickles and dips out of the window of their HaightAshbury apartment. This eventually led to making muffulettas, which became so popular
they shifted their focus to the sandwiches.
Long overshadowed by the po’boy as Louisiana’s most famous sandwich, Harter thinks the muffuletta is on the cusp of becoming the next big thing. He’s starting to see it crop up outside of New Orleans (locally you can find it at Jane the Bakery, the Fatted Calf and a handful of San Francisco sandwich shops).
“I feel like it’s about to have its moment,” Harter said.
But how is this legendary sandwich made? Here is an anatomy of the Sandy’s muffuletta and its most essential ingredients.
The bread.
Oakland’s Firebrand Artisan Breads makes an enormous, 12-inch sesame loaf especially for Sandy’s. “We just wanted to have something that was comically large,” Harter said. It’s soft and spongy, and it must be sprinkled with sesame seeds on the top. Having the correct bread, Harter said, is nonnegotiable for a muffuletta.
The mayonnaise.
Yes, there is mayo in this muffuletta. He settled on the cult favorite Duke’s Mayonnaise after testing with Japanese Kewpie mayo (too sweet). He carefully slices the large bread in half and then uses an offset spatula to create an even layer of mayo, taking care to spread it all the way to the edges of the bread. This is key to ensure “that every bite is the same as the first bite,” Harter said.
The olive salad.
Sandy’s olive salad is the most labor intensive aspect of the sandwich. It starts with a cauliflower and carrot giardiniera, which sits for a few days in its own pickling liquid and
then gets mixed with kalamata olives, capers, spicy cherry peppers and herbs. On a recent trip to New Orleans, Harter encountered a muffuletta with a disappointing amount of olive salad (“it was depressing,” he said), and would never want that same fate to befall a Sandy’s customer. So a whole, pre-sliced sandwich gets fully loaded with an entire quart of the punchy condiment — one layer goes on top of the mayo, and another over the meats and cheese. (Sandy’s will also sell containers of the salad.)
The meat.
Every Sandy’s muffuletta is stacked with three fresh-sliced meats imported from Italy:
mortadella, prosciutto and slightly spicy soppressata. Slicing the meat, neither too thick nor too thin, is an art. The slices also have to be assembled properly, so that every bite is consistent. Harter lays overlapping slices of each meat (first mortadella, then prosciutto and soppressata) in a mesmerizing spiral design, like a meaty “Fibonacci sequence,” he said, referring to the mathematical series.
The cheese.
Harter rejected the classic Swiss for his cheese of choice: provolone piccante, an aged cow’s milk cheese with more flavor. Because Harter serves his muffulettas warm — they’re
assembled at room temperature, and then go into a panini press — the cheese melts alluringly into the meats. The heat draws out flavors that wouldn’t otherwise be there, he said: The olive salad gets “more expressive,” the sesame seeds get a little extra toasty.
Sacrificing tradition here just makes sense: “For me, at the end of the day, I just want a delicious-ass sandwich,” Harter said.