A Day Making NYC’s Most Hyped Sandwiches

So at first, I was making sandwiches

out of my home kitchen, delivering them on a moto Ape,

and then finally made the move to brick and mortar.

On my own, I was making about 100 sandwiches a week.

Now we do that number in about a day.

We have a different menu for dinner.

It turns from a sandwich shop into a Neapolitan restaurant.

I'm learning to manage my front of house,

back of house team, distributors,

our bakers, repairing things.

I guess that's what being your own boss looks like.

[chill jazzy music]

Hey, welcome back, I'm Sal of Salvo's.

We have quite a bit to do.

You guys can come on in and follow me.

[bright piano music]

This is our dining room, we fit 26 people in here.

We have our bar, and the kitchen's over here in the back.

Prior to the restaurant, it was a cobbler's.

So we put all this stuff in brand new.

It's the first industrial kitchen I've ever built.

So it's definitely a step above my home kitchen.

We definitely needed a big meat slicer for this kitchen.

I had a smaller one at the house

and it definitely wouldn't cut it for the restaurant.

So this is our big guy.

[smooth jazz music]

First, we're gonna prep the Neapolitan ragu,

which is meat and tomato-based with ziti,

a very typical Neapolitan shape.

It's just gonna cling the sauce really well.

So we just started our day

but we're already prepping our dinner,

and that's because this sauce is slow cooked

and it requires many hours of time.

Traditionally, families would take home

some of the more undesirable cuts of meat.

It required a long cook time just so it could tenderize.

This pork sausage, we get from Valentino's,

it's a local market.

We brown the sausage, we brown all the meat

because we get a lot more flavor that way.

Hope's here, welcome.

We don't have like the most typical hierarchy.

Team comes in, we check out what we gotta do

for the day on the whiteboard there.

It's a lot of overlap,

a lot of collaboration between the staff.

Hope, I figure I'm making the ragu,

and if you wanna get the lunch stuff.

Yeah. That'd makes sense.

So the next thing we're putting in are our short ribs.

Short rib would definitely be a luxury

in a Sunday ragu from back in the day,

but by the end of the cooking, it'll all fall off the bone

and the meat almost, like, disintegrates.

It's just super delicious.

So we pair the Neapolitan Ragu with the ziti.

Ziti means partner or lover or like,

fiance in Italian and became popularized

because it was served at weddings a lot of the time.

[smooth jazz music]

So when we were thinking of a vegetarian sandwich,

the parmigiana came to mind.

So this is sunflower oil that we're gonna use

to fry our melanzane, our eggplant,

for our eggplant parmigiana.

All the bread for our sandwiches

comes from Otway Bakery in Brooklyn.

In Italy, it's not something

you would throw into a sandwich.

That's more of like an Italian American interpretation.

We don't bread it or fry it, sauce it up.

We're not even cooking it entirely right now

because we're gonna throw it in the oven and bake it.

The origin of the name is a sort of misinterpretation

of the Sicilian dialect

that translates to shutters in Sicilian.

When we're assembling the parmigiana,

you'll see how we're laying it out in a similar pattern

and it's sort of reminiscent of a shutter in a window.

We're gonna layer it with scamorza cheese.

A cheese that has less moisture, so when we bake it,

it doesn't goo up into nothing.

A lot of basil, grated Parmesan cheese

and we'll bake it for about 10 minutes

and it'll be ready to go for service.

The Neapolitan ragu is really special to me

and I think special to the city of Naples.

This smell of freezing meat reminds me of Sunday mornings.

As a kid, I would wake up to this smell.

My mom would get started

on dinner first thing in the morning.

So now it's time to add our sofrito, the holy trinity,

carrots, onions, celery.

It's gonna be the base of our sauce, pancetta, our herbs.

And lastly, our salsiccia.

At the end of the season,

when all the tomatoes are fully ripe,

they're preserved by making tomato sauce, passata.

A way to even further preserve the passata

is to dry it of all of its moisture.

This passata is plained out on boards in Sicily

and the sun takes care of the rest.

It dries up into salsiccia,

which is this flavor bomb of tomato,

deglazed with a little bit of our white wine.

We'll give the alcohol a minute to evaporate

before we throw in the meat again.

And our passata now, keep an eye on it throughout the day.

It's got about eight hours to cook

and we'll tuck it in for its nap.

So I just wanna check my phone

to see if we have a notification from our bakery.

We still get our bread delivered by an Uber courier.

Otway sends it over from Fulton Street

in Brooklyn every morning.

This is my sister, Sabrina.

Hello. Sabrina now works here.

She's the front of house.

We've kind of always been doing stuff together.

We're like really tight-knit family.

I'm actually building a wall

in the basement with my father, so he's my contractor.

Anyway, we do have a notification

from Sam over at Otway.

Curbside by 10:35, it is 10:35 on the dot.

There it is, wow, look at that.

Great timing.

Thank you, man, I appreciate it.

One more. One more, thank you.

This is a focaccia, bunch of ciabatta underneath.

Baguettes here and we also have a loaf of Pullman

that we use for our grilled cheese.

Back when I was making sandwiches in my home kitchen,

I would order about this much bread for the day

and it's this much now.

So it's gotten a lot larger.

We still use Otway because I think

that they're the most delicious bread in the neighborhood.

I've tried dozens of bakeries

and I just think that their stuff is exceptional.

They make bread better than I could ever,

so I quickly let the pros handle it.

We have about 15 minutes

before we break for family meal.

Hope and I are just gonna get jamming on that.

[bright chill music]

All right, [speaks in Italian]

time for our staff meal.

In a half hour begins lunch service,

so we're gonna relax a bit, have something to eat,

chat and then put our aprons back on.

[bright chill music]

So we just finished up staff meal,

keeping an eye out on the ragu.

Now we're kicking off our service.

On our busiest days, we'll do over 100 sandwiches

in three hours service.

Johnny, what's up?

So I used to do delivery,

I used to ride around the neighborhood.

It's much more human to have people coming in here

with the people who cooked their food.

It kind of forces people to take a beat

and hang out in the space for a little bit.

I just wanted to try to make it as, like,

intimate and personal as possible.

So the next bit of prep we're gonna do for dinner

is the Genovese pasta sauce.

Braised beef, onions and carrots with our rigatoni.

So it's definitely on the partier side.

So we have our beef here that we're gonna braise,

butter and oil, carrots and plenty of onion.

Let that simmer, we'll add our spices as we go on.

But this is also a longer cooked time.

The Genovese are the people from Genoa

who moved to Naples to get a lot of jobs at the ports.

It said that they brought over with them this dish,

which the Neapolitans claim as their own.

I'm gonna let this cook for a few hours.

In the meantime, I'm gonna jump in,

help Hope with the lunch rush.

We got an eggplant parmigiana.

We bake the trays during prep.

When we get them per order,

we just cut out our little square,

we throw it in the oven

so it's a lot quicker during service.

While that's doing its thing,

I'm gonna assemble one of the fried mortadella.

Fried mortadella sandwich,

then popularized by the late Anthony Bourdain,

we're frying the mortadella on the griddle here,

adding provolone cheese.

Mortadella is considered fancy bologna.

It's very pretty meat marbled.

It's from the city of Bologna.

It's the same spelling as the word baloney.

So that's where baloney gets its name from.

So we figure out which loaf of bread

is best for which sandwich.

The ciabatta's pretty delicate

'cause it's got like these big air pockets.

We used to run the roast beef Genovese on the ciabatta,

but it was getting a little too soggy with the jus

that we used for that sandwich and it was falling apart.

So we can put on our baguette now, throw in our lemon aioli.

We'd sort of thought of this because we use a lot of lemons

and we had a lot of juice left over, broccoli rabe.

We had gotten Broccoli rabe delivered on accident

from one of our vendors.

So we were trying to figure out a way to get rid of it.

Had put it on the menu, so this was our solution.

We add some hot chili flakes to this, a little kick.

All right, our fried mortadella.

Yeah, it gets like super crispy on the edges.

We have one grilled cheese with cotto,

one grilled cheese, no cotto.

The grilled cheese sandwich.

Something that I thought would be really fun to include.

We use Fontina cheese, Parmesano cheese

and prosciutto cotto.

I have an order for Isabelle.

You'll have the eggplant Genovese and the special, all you.

Thank you.

We have a chalkboard menu

and I think that is a metaphor for what we put on the menu.

Oftentimes, we'll run a sandwich for a day

just based on what we have in the kitchen,

what we wanna make.

At the end of the day, you know, we're making sandwiches.

I think we're having fun.

[bright music]

Okay, so we just finished our lunch service.

It is 4:04, we have about an hour and a half

to prep everything we need.

First thing I'm working on is the pesto

for the [speaks in Italian].

Broccoli rabe pesto.

We pair it with a bucatini,

whipped rigotta with lemon and some herbs.

And then we top that with the florets

from the broccoli rabe which we blanched for a second.

Broccoli rabe is delicious.

It's like, got, like, a nice amount of bitterness,

sweetness, almost buttery.

So in there goes olive oil.

We sort of, like, put this on the menu

as an introduction to springtime.

[mixer whirring]

Olivia is prepping right now.

She's gonna work through dinner service.

She's a line cook, she an ex-park ranger.

She's very cool.

Last weekend was the first feature of this pasta.

This weekend will be its second.

[mixer whirring]

So I just added Pecorino, which will take care of that acid.

Before that, we hadn't added anything,

and then I just added some salt.

I feel like no matter how much salt you put,

it's not enough, but I think we're there.

So the sauce is finished.

We are looking good for service.

I'm floating around during dinner service.

I'll be like front of house.

I'll be peeking my head back here in the kitchen.

Transitioning from making sandwiches all day

to making salads and a lot of pastas.

It transforms from a sandwich shop into a restaurant,

you know, setting the dining room, put out the candles.

It becomes like a real nice, soft, intimate place.

So we got about five minutes left before service begins,

and you guys have been awesome to hang out with.

Great guests.

I'm just gonna have to have you guys move out now.

Yeah, see you next time.

[smooth jazz music]