The Fine Dining Chef Behind One of NYC’s Best Sandwich Shops

I left the best restaurant in the world

to make sandwiches.

I was at 11 Madison Park.

Most of my career has been in fine dining restaurants.

Brown Bag Sandwich Company is a neighborhood sandwich shop.

Most of our sandwiches are chopped to essentially make sure

that you're getting a bite

of everything that's in that sandwich.

It just ensures a perfect bite every time.

[bright upbeat music]

Hey, guys. I'm Antonio.

Co-owner and chef of Brown Bag Sandwich Company.

It's 8:45, so the first thing I'm gonna do

is get our menu set up in our A-Frame.

We're more centered around businesses.

Because of that, our lunch rush is insane.

In between 11:30 and 1:00 pm, it's nonstop.

On an average day, we could easily be doing

250 sandwiches in that 90 minutes.

So right now, I'm gonna go downstairs.

I'm gonna take a look at the list.

[bright upbeat music]

This is Jose. Jose is one of our prep cooks.

He's an absolute godsend.

He gets here at 6 o'clock in the morning every single day.

Jose is gonna be helping us out with the Italian today.

We batch out our Italian mixture,

which is the base of the sandwich.

We like it to marinate for a few hours before service.

It actually intensifies the flavor.

And on top of that, it makes it efficient for us

for when we're in service

to be able to produce sandwiches in a timely manner.

Everything's weighed out to make sure that the customer

is getting the same product over and over.

So far, we've gotten most everything into this bowl.

So, we're gonna add basil.

And then what we do is we take a pizza cutter.

Because it's in a bowl, the rounded blade

allows it to chop through the mixture.

Easier than a knife, and it's quicker than using scissors.

So, in the Italian we have prosciutto, soppressata,

tomato, cherry peppers, onion, basil,

mozzarella, and sharp provolone.

I think if we were not chopping the sandwich,

it'd be hard to put all these ingredients in there.

I mean, how many times have you had a cold cut sandwich?

You take a bite, the prosciutto's pulling out

and it's getting everywhere.

So, this way it just ensures a perfect bite every time.

We also have lists for our prep.

Everything's kinda broken down into categories.

This is prep that needs to happen first

because these are the items

that are gonna take a while to complete.

I've come from fine dining restaurants,

so organization was just kind of like, instilled in me.

Some might say beaten into me.

So, Jose is done.

I'm gonna go upstairs.

In 20 minutes,

we're gonna have to start making our catering order.

[bright upbeat music]

So it's 9:15.

First, I need to introduce you

to my business partner and co-owner, Gilli.

We're going over the catering order.

The client wants our sandwiches to be placed on platters,

which isn't typical,

so we're gonna kinda problem solve around this.

As for stickers, when we're putting these on the platter,

I think we're gonna have to stand the sandwich up

because if we lay it down, I don't think

we're gonna have enough room with the platters.

Yep. We actually have

a big catering order today.

30 Caesar wraps. Okay.

23 turkey club. Okay.

And then, 15 regular Italian and two gluten-free.

Okay. It's like

that Henry Ford style assembly.

This sandwich line is actually gonna,

essentially finish off the hot sandwiches

that are coming from the griddle right here.

So, they'll start there.

They'll move their way down here.

All the ingredients that need to go into each sandwich

are gonna complete those and then be passed down.

And on the other side of the griddle

is gonna be our cold sandwiches.

So, we kinda try to separate that.

So, the menu mix is spread out and one employee

isn't getting hammered with every sandwich.

We have kinda sheets up here for all the sandwiches.

They have weights on the filling,

along with the other ingredients

that are gonna go on top of the sandwich,

both Spanish and English.

This is our mixture for the Caesar wrap.

So, in here we have shredded romaine,

chicken that we're making in-house,

croutons that we've made in-house.

Obviously the Caesar dressing.

So, he's gonna chop this and we're gonna start to fill 'em,

roll 'em, and wrap 'em.

[bright lively music]

This is a sandwich, once it's been assembled,

you can see all the ingredients in there.

Everything's chopped.

It's an even mixture and layout across the sandwich.

Someone takes a bite here, here, or here,

it doesn't really matter.

They're gonna get all of the ingredients in one bite.

I'm gonna get started on our Caesar wraps.

It's quite literally about a pound of filling in each wrap.

Again, we're focusing on making sure it's a consistent bite.

We've completed the catering order.

We've placed everything on platters.

I'm excited to see how the delivery driver

is gonna take this and bring it to the location.

[gentle upbeat music]

It is 10:30. Our doors are officially open to the public.

We just got our first order.

It's gonna be our hot roast beef and cheddar.

So, we're gonna start with our bread.

We use the seeded sesame hero.

It comes from Parisi Bakery, old school Italian bakery.

All of our bread is gonna be toasted in clarified butter.

It makes a sandwich a better product at the end of the day.

The weights on top of the bread ensure

that the bread is gonna get toasted evenly.

It's then gonna go into our seasoned beef stock.

We have these nice little pasta baskets

that have kind of worked out well for us.

This is how we're gonna heat up the roast beef itself.

On the bottom of the bread is gonna be our brown bag sauce.

That was concepted from this product called Branston Pickle.

It's an English product.

It's sweet, it's tangy.

You could think of it almost like a chunky barbecue sauce.

So, we have our beef.

Next is gonna be our cheddar sauce.

We're making this in-house.

We could easily just buy pre-made sauce,

but I wanna use real cheddar cheese.

On top of the cheddar are gonna be fried onions.

This is actually a product that I do not make in-house.

These are French's Fried Onions.

I love 'em. They stay crispy forever.

Not every sandwich from the shop is gonna be chopped.

And the roast beef just doesn't need that additional step.

Okay, so order just came in for a chopped cheese.

What we've done to set ourself up for service,

we've essentially pre-batched 20 chopped cheeses.

Onions are gonna go underneath.

That's gonna help to steam them out.

All of the drippings from the burger patties

are gonna funnel their way down into the onions.

And from here, we're gonna start the chopping process.

[knife clanking] [meat sizzling]

And it's a process.

So, if a customer comes in and they wanna chop cheese,

we're able to give it to 'em

in that five minute window or less.

If we were to make every single chopped cheese to order,

when it gets busy,

they're gonna be waiting upwards of 30 minutes

if you're doing one at a time.

Each one of those little bundles of cheese

is three slices of American,

which is one portion of chopped cheese.

So, she's putting 20 of these bundles,

AKA 60 slices of cheese onto the mixture right now.

It's a lot of cheese.

On top of that, we're gonna add our bodega sauce,

which you could kind of think of as like a Big Mac sauce,

ketchup, mayo, mustard, and dill pickle hache.

We're gonna add our sliced tomatoes.

The tomato we wanna slice it thin

so that it's not overpowering the sandwich.

And on top of that,

we're gonna add our shredded iceberg lettuce.

And then, this is gonna get wrapped.

All right, so we got another order in.

This is gonna be our spicy cutlet sandwich.

So, first thing I'm gonna do is weigh out our chicken.

It's gonna go into the fryer.

Our chicken cutlet,

it's marinated anywhere from 12 to 24 hours

in buttermilk and spices.

And then, from there it goes directly into Panko

and it just eliminates one of the processes

that you would typically need in order to make cutlets.

So in a bowl, we're gonna get our spicy vodka sauce,

get a scoop of our hot peppers, and fresh mozzarella.

Cutlet is gonna go directly into the vodka sauce,

peppers, and mozzarella.

This is all gonna get mixed together.

Again, we just wanna make sure

that you're getting a little bit of everything in each bite.

So, we pre-dice the cutlet.

I feel like whenever I have a cutlet sandwich,

sauce is falling out, the cutlets are falling out.

So, we're trying to eliminate that for the guest here.

And then on top of our cutlet,

we're gonna place some fresh basil, and that'll get wrapped.

[bright upbeat music] [wrapper crinkling]

All right.

[bright upbeat music]

So, it's 11:15.

Customers are gonna start to funnel in the door.

So, I think from this point, we're gonna put our heads down

and try to knock out the lunch rush.

You wanna expo today?

I want, sure. Yeah?

[bright upbeat music]

Armando is gonna be running expo station.

So, whenever he's passing me down a sandwich,

he's gonna tell me what it is.

I'm gonna initial the sandwich.

Up here, we have a little cheat sheet

of what initials on each sandwich should look like.

[food sizzling]

Diane, do you have the turkey club wrap?

Yeah. No bacon?

We're typically listening to music in here.

I have this salsa playlist that's banging.

Loud, but controlled loud.

[bright lively music]

Can I get two more Mac salads, separate bags,

and then a pickle in a bag with one of those?

If the order is a delivery order

and the bag's ready to get stapled,

I'm putting that ticket up here

versus putting it underneath the bag.

That's for walk-in customers.

But that's the sign that you know everything's in the bag.

It's ready to go.

What we're doing with our hot sandwiches

is I'm gonna label it.

I'm gonna put the ticket number on,

so that it can't get confused.

And this, we're gonna hold in our warming drawer.

When the delivery driver comes, we can pass the sandwich on,

but that way it stays hot for as long as possible.

In the wintertime, 40, 45% of our business can be delivery.

Whereas in the summer when people are walking around,

it might be 25, 30%.

[oil sizzling]

[paper rustling]

[bright lively music]

All right, the lunch rush is over.

I still have a few more things to complete

before the day is over, so I gotta get back to it.

Thank you guys for your time.

You guys don't gotta go home,

but you gotta get the hell outta here.

[bright lively music]