Meat Cheese Bread

[January 14th, 2009]

It looks like 2009 may go down as Portland’s year of the $8 chef’s sandwich: Former Meriwether’s chef Tommy Habetz opened Bunk Sandwiches in November, former El Gaucho chef Michael McFarlane will open Petisco, a sandwich joint, in the near future, and Portland’s princes of pastrami, Nick Zukin and Ken Gordon, plan to open a globe-hopping spinoff of their downtown deli, called Kenny Zuke’s SandwichWorks, on Northwest Thurman Street this spring.

At the front of the trend is John Stewart, who has been selling refined variations on the theme of meat, cheese and bread since September, before any of his competitors even signed a lease. “I’ve wanted to do sandwiches for a long time, ever since I was a kid,” he told WW. “I started out working in less-than-fine-dining restaurants. And I learned to do fine dining, but I discovered that what I really wanted was to make sandwiches.”

Stewart, an Albuquerque native, saw an opportunity in Portland: “Since I moved here, there weren’t that many places that had inexpensive good food,” he said. “I was kind of looking for a place where I could walk in and grab something and be out in five minutes with something handheld for a few bucks.”

That, in essence, is what you’ll find at Meat Cheese Bread. The tiny storefront offers speedy service, low prices (nothing over $9) and really, really good sandwiches. Stewart’s last two gigs were at Grand Central Baking and Park Kitchen, and the experience carries over in the bread and the excellent ingredients that dutifully follow the seasons—the BLT became a BLB (with roasted beets) as soon as tomato season ended.

I’ve yet to be disappointed by anything on Stewart’s menu, but here are a few sure hits: the smoked ham with Gruyère and aioli on a house-made bun ($4.95), which I consumed in four heady bites; the roasted mushroom, a funky, steaming pile of fungus on the same roll, dressed with goat cheese, sherry-cured onions and frisée ($6.95), which is by far the best veggie sandwich in town; the Park Kitchen ($7.95), a refined combo of steak, pickled onions, blue-cheese mayonnaise and lettuce; and the authentically New Mexican breakfast burrito ($4.75), which has developed a much-deserved cult following.