Ggiata Sandwiches. Credit: Ggiata

Unpopular Food Opinions: You Don’t Really Love Sandwiches

10 Minute read

19 Feb 2026

Joel Stein

Writer

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What you think is devotion to layered ingredients may just be a culturally acceptable excuse to eat more bread.

In our infantilized culture, where self-proclaimed foodies rave about smash burgers and pizza-by-the-slice joints, and where I wholly expect to soon read a four-star New York Times review of a baby formula restaurant, I hear a lot about sandwiches.

Owen Han has 2.5 million followers who watch him make sandwiches. Food Network host Jeff Mauro put out a show called Sandwich King. Last year, Matty Matheson released a cookbook titled Soups, Salads, Sandwiches. I do not believe his publisher would have let that guy write one called Soups and Salads.

Sandwich aficionados fully believe they’re appreciating a complex, lasagna-alla-Bolognese-level layering of ingredients when they consume a ham and mortadella sub.

They are wrong.

They just like the bread.

Owen Han x All'Antico Vinaio. Credit All'Antico Vinaio

Americans, especially ones who don’t go to Olive Garden, have precious few opportunities to enjoy bread. We have carb-scared ourselves out of serving a loaf with dinner, screen-obsessed ourselves out of picnics, smoothied away from breakfasting with jam, and plastic-wrapped our charcuterie into individual portions. We are starving for bread. And sandwiches are all that’s left.

So when people go crazy over the sandwiches at All’Antico Vinaio or Pino’s, they’re excited about the fresh, warm focaccia. I’ve had them, as well as Seattle’s Un Bien’s Caribbean roast pork sandwich, Bub & Grandma’s tuna sandwich in L.A., and Parisi Bakery’s The Dennis in Manhattan, and I loved them. Because of their bread. There is a successful sandwich shop in L.A. that has been around for 16 years called All About the Bread.

Credit All'Antico Vinaio

I ran my theory by Bill Oakley, the former co-showrunner of The Simpsons who has become a “professional food enthusiast” (hosting dinners featuring hyper-local American dishes, creating a sausage for Portland’s MLS stadium, eating a lot of fast food on Instagram).

Bill thought I was an idiot. He also disagreed with my theory.

He began the way I feared he would by saying that many types of sandwiches require flavorless white buns that don’t get in the way of the filling: hamburgers, hot dogs, barbecue sandwiches. This I agree with. A pastrami sandwich also requires a decent rye, but not a great one.

But are these really sandwiches? Or are they just plates of meat you’d rather eat with your hands?

After agreeing on this subset of sandwiches, Oakley went on to tell me why I’m wrong. Sure, he said, crappy bread can ruin a sandwich. “I’ve had a lot of sandwiches where the bread is too hard and scrapes the top of your mouth like Captain Crunch, and stuff squeezes out of the side,” he says. But he thinks bread can only elevate a sandwich so much. “The bread is a vessel. It’s the glass that holds the wine. It’s like the icing on a cake.” I don’t remember The Simpsons enjoying analogies this much.

Getting the pairing is important, Oakley said: rye with pastrami, a Philly cheesesteak with rolls from Amoroso’s, po boys with French bread from Leidenheimer’s. But he says that even those breads are supporting actors helping the leads tell their story.

Oakley estimated that bread makes up about 20 percent of a sandwich’s quality. Even in a sandwich with fantastic bread, he says, it’s never the star. “I had the tuna sandwich at Bub & Grandma’s. It was one of the best sandwiches I’ve had all year. I know it’s a bakery, but I don’t remember if it was white or sourdough.” (It’s toasted challah. Oakley is one of the few gentile comedy writers, though his writing partner since eighth grade is Josh Weinstein. So there’s really no excuse.)

He also loved the Don Pepe (chicken, stracciatella, red peppers, arugula on a charred baguette) at Ggiata in L.A., noting how good the bread was. But he still thought it wasn’t the difference maker. “The bread enhanced my enjoyment. It was a 30 percent,” he says. He also noted that Ggiata’s spread was excellent. “The spread could be 20 percent of that sandwich. So there’s 50 percent. That’s the max the bread and the spread can be.”

I called Noah Holton-Raphael, one of the three co-founders of Ggiata, which aims to recreate the sandwiches they grew up with in New Jersey, the same types of sandwiches that I also grew up with in New Jersey. And when you ask a New Jersey guy to tell you why you’re stupid, as I did with Holton-Raphael, you need to brace yourself.

“Your theory is plucked straight from the Ggiata culinary ethos,” he said, to my shock and relief. “If you have really great fresh bread and grill it or toast it and put a really good spread on it, chances are anything else you put on the sandwich will taste good.”

Bread, he says, is by far the most important part. “You can have great ingredients, but if you have shitty bread, it’s going to be a bad sandwich. But you can take great bread and pretty mediocre ingredients, and the result is going to be a pretty good sandwich.” Even Jewish delis like Katz’s and Langer’s, he says, source really good rye bread.

Before they opened Ggiata, the founders tasted bread from dozens of bakeries, eventually working with one to custom-make their ciabattas and baguettes. “The most important way for Ggiata to stand out is to have bread no one else can have,” he says.

Last January, Ggiata did a pop-up at Scarr’s Pizza in New York, using up most of the area’s excess consonants. The three founders flew in a couple of weeks before the event to work with Nicolo’s Italian Bakery in their hometown, Montclair, New Jersey, on creating bread for their sandwich. They woke up at 5 a.m. to pick up 300 rolls and bring them to the city. “We were like, ‘We can’t possibly fuck the bread up,’” he said.

In Spain, France, and Italy, Holton-Raphael pointed out, sandwiches are even more bread-focused. Instead of a pile of meat, a Spanish bocadillo with jamón and Manchego or a French jambon beurre has a thin layer of ingredients, thereby highlighting the baguette. A Danish smørrebrød only has one piece of bread, and it’s still the most important part of it.

This is not an argument against sandwiches. It’s an argument for bread. Maybe if you let yourself have more of it on its own, you wouldn’t get overenthusiastic about a sandwich. Maybe you’d even sit down for a meal with a knife and fork like a real adult once in a while.