Northern New Jersey--Center of the Food Universe?

Maybe. Growing up there, I didn’t appreciate the uniqueness of our culinary world. Hard rolls with crisp crusts and airy centers, diners with massive menus and long hours, hand-crafted sausages, delicatessens open on Sundays because owned and operated by Jewish families, deep-fat-fried zeppolis and Naples-style pizzas, young lamb and marbled pork sold as a matter of course even in supermarkets, and much else turned out to be regional developments, affectations, and/or infrastructures (depending on your perspective).

The hardest one to take was the paucity of good sandwiches in the outside world. In northern NJ, sandwiches were taken very seriously. If you served crappy sandwiches, your clientele was limited. At the rarefied top end, pubs and sub shops competed for customers who could tell Italian coppa colla from Canadian, and fake prosciutto from the real thing. 

Of course, it didn’t help that I wended my way south from NJ after emerging from my pubescent cocoon. The American South is another insular food world, with people stunned that creamy grits, stewed greens, high-quality fried chicken, and sweet fruit concoctions topped with various pastries aren’t the global standards they seemed when the whole world was the highway from Atlanta to Savannah. 

Things are much better now. Quirky regional foods, even really weird shit, are generally available beyond their home turf via the internet at worst, by local purveyors in many cases. Sandwiches, it turns out, have their own independent history worldwide. But where Italians settled, the overall level of sandwich quality was high. Regardless of who else was around. And with the sandwiches went functional pizza, pies with crisp crusts and light-handed toppings. 

Here are some examples from a New England cultural crossroads. 

Pizza with feta, onions, and anchovies.

This was an experiment intended to 

identify the level of aromatic fast food

refuse needed to scare off hotel cleaning

crews. It wasn’t even close.

A decent sub and a honkin’ container 

of fries from the same pizza place. I had 

to heave thick layers of parmesan, pepper

flakes, and, surprisingly, salt, onto the 

fries on the way out. As the counter kid told me, 

“we don’t put salt on ‘em. Some people have 

issues.” 

All washed down with a delicate, fragile 

example of the vintner’s art.