Few sandwiches in the pantheon of great sandwiches have attained the status of the Italian combo. This hero of heroes goes by many names—the Italian sub, the Godfather, the surname of any number of Italian American icons—but it is, in its Platonic form, a long roll stuffed with cured Italian meats, plus cheese, shredded iceberg lettuce, thinly sliced onion, oil, and red-wine vinegar. When well executed, it is one of the few sandwiches that achieve what I can only call completeness: a sandwich that wants for nothing, that is, in every sense, enough. I have eaten more Italian combos than I can count, and more than most people I know; if I am not one-tenth soppressata by body weight, it’s not for lack of trying. And yet my favorite Italian sandwich in New York City—maybe my favorite sandwich, period—contains no meat whatsoever.

That sandwich is the Vegitalian combo, from Court Street Grocers, the unbearably charming Carroll Gardens sandwich shop that opened in 2010 and now has additional locations in Williamsburg and Manhattan. Its owners, Eric Finkelstein and Matt Ross, are sandwich freaks in the best possible way; on the shop’s vast menu, not a single sandwich is a dud. This achievement can only be the product of an obsessive, near-philosophical approach to the sandwich as a composition, to the gestalt of the bite. On its face, the Vegitalian is a provocation: a meatless Italian sub, a contradiction in terms, a thing that should not work and yet absolutely does. Court Street makes a traditional meat-filled Italian combo as well, which is fine, but only the Vegitalian is my favorite.

What makes me love it with such evangelical intensity is what it has taught me about the true meaning of its salumi-filled counterpart. Sandwich aficionados will spend happy hours yelling at one another about the proper cold cuts for an Italian combo, debating with Talmudic intensity the relative merits of soppressata versus capicola, or whether to include a layer of mortadella (nice, in my opinion) or prosciutto (never; a textural abomination). But the Vegitalian renders all of those arguments entirely moot, by evoking all the best parts of a meat-laden sandwich meatlessly. What’s important isn’t the meat itself but what it provides: heft, bite, umami, complexity, funk, fat. In the hands of a sandwich master, these things can come from elsewhere—in the Vegitalian, thin slabs of fresh mozzarella and, of all things, a thick layer of roasted sweet-potato slices.

The alchemy of any given sandwich is both specific and forgiving. Its stacked ingredients merge and mingle—you can swap out this or that, as long as whatever replaces it serves a similar role. In the Vegitalian, the sweet potato, with its happy mushiness, has a surprisingly similar yielding texture to a ruffled heap of thinly sliced deli meats, and its subtle sweetness evokes that of many salumi. Not immaterially, its bright-orange color looks absolutely gorgeous against the rest of the sandwich. (In a previous iteration, the sandwich was made with sliced butternut squash, which to me more closely mimicked the mouthfeel of deli meat; sweet potato makes the sandwich squishier and less tidy, which offers its own pleasures.)

Helen, Help Me!
E-mail your questions about dining, eating, and anything food-related, and Helen may respond in a future newsletter.

Every other detail of the Vegitalian likewise replaces an element that the meats provided in the original. Arugula, in lieu of more traditional iceberg lettuce, adds peppery bite. Pecorino, rather than Parmigiano, provides funk. In addition to mozzarella (salty, springy) there is a very nontraditional layer of Swiss cheese, lending a gently savory note. Rather than a conventional splash of red-wine vinegar, the Vegitalian gets a hefty smear of Court Street Grocers’ signature “hoagie spread,” a piquant relish of kalamata and green olives plus a briny, giardiniera-style mix of cauliflower, carrots, peppers, and other pickly things. There’s also a smear of mayo—Italian-combo sacrilege, in some sandwich circles, though I’ve always felt that it boosts the lusciousness of this sort of sandwich. The bread is a soft-crumbed, crackly-crusted seeded roll, with faintly salty pockets of air. To be fair, all these components are present in Court Street Grocers’ standard Italian combo, too—but the result, in that case, is less adjacent to perfection, with too many strong notes competing for the same frequencies.

What I find most wondrous about the Vegitalian is that it’s not a vegetarian sandwich that happens to be good. It’s not a concession to dietary preference, or a consolation prize. It is, in every sense, a more considered sandwich than the typical monument to meat; every ingredient is load-bearing, each element thought through and assigned a job. The result is a sandwich that illuminates, a sandwich that delights, a sandwich that redefines the Italian combo as a structure, a set of relationships, a formula that admits many solutions. The meat never figures, and you never miss it; all you miss, when the sandwich is gone, is the sandwich itself. ♦