Pepper Turkey Melt

Pepper Turkey Melt
Going back to the grilled-cheese-made-under-the-broiler method, I stacked black pepper-crusted, roasted turkey breast and pepper jack cheese with a little Grey Poupon on some healthy, whole-grain, multi-seeded bread and put the oven to work. Turned out crunchy, melty, a bit spicy, and quite flavorful. Thanks, broiler.



Falafel at the Goodwich
Just off the top of the dome, I can't recall a better veggie sandwich than Goodwich's beautifully green take on falafel. It's made with fresh peas, loaded with flavor and smashed onto the flat top grill like everything else at the Goodwich—that flat top is magical. The crisp outside texture and tender, almost creamy interior is unlike any falafel we've sampled. Added to the mix is a garlicky chickpea puree, cucumbers and kale coleslaw in ranchy dressing, all layered between that sublime Goodwich toast. It's a bite beyond satisfying, good enough to make you wonder why you stick to plain old meat and cheese between bread.


Beerhaus Brat

Beerhaus Brat at Beerhaus


New England Lobster Roll

New England Lobster Roll at The Oyster Bar



Fairfax at Eggslut
Can a simple breakfast sandwich really live up to the hype surrounding Eggslut, the former food truck that has taken Los Angeles mornings by storm and now expanded to Las Vegas with a shop at the Cosmopolitan on the Strip? When its makers concentrate on making each ingredient as delicious as possible, the answer is yes. Our first taste of the 'slut is the Fairfax, probably the most popular sandwich on the menu: cage-free soft-scrambled eggs with a bit of chopped chives blended in, caramelized onions, cheddar cheese and sriracha mayo in soft brioche. Avoiding rookie mistakes, we added bacon and avocado, and the result is pure indulgence. It really needs the crispy, salty bacon to punch through all the warm, creamy goodness, and that mayo brings the tang. The eggs are in the spotlight, of course, with a melt-in-your-mouth texture and fresh flavor. We're not sure if Eggslut is worth waiting in hours-long lines like they do in L.A., but the Vegas version will become a regular stop on the allsandwich rotation, in the morning and after hours.


Lamb Shawarma

Lamb Shawarma at Cleo
Until recently, we were always too busy noshing on babaganoush and carrot harissa and "spicy cigars" and the other tremendous mezze at Las Vegas' best Mediterranean restaurant, Cleo at SLS, to make our way to the few sandwiches on the menu. There are lamb sliders, too, but we had to go with the shawarma first, about three bites of the most luscious, slow-roasted, indulgently spiced lamb you've ever tasted—literally dripping with savory juices—topped with onions and fresh parsley, all tucked into a mini-pita. One of these is in no way enough. Now we have another great snack to add to our regular Cleo rotation.


The New Yorker

The New Yorker at PT's Brewing Co.
In the history of meat-stacked, deli-style sandwiches, have you ever found one done the right way in a bar? How about in a brewery? It seems like it can't possibly work out, but PT's Brewing Co.—the new beer-making arm of the ubiquitous Las Vegas tavern company—delivers a monster of quality here, especially impressive because the pastrami and corned beef are made in house. Thick, salty slabs of those two sandwich faves, plus tender, medium-rare roast beef, all somehow stay upright between two holding-on-for-dear-life pieces of marbled rye. Provolone and Swiss cheeses are added to the mix to add a different kind of richness, while coleslaw brings a nice fresh crunch and Thousand Island rides in with a little tang. This is a true meat mountain, and there aren't a lot of delis around the Vegas valley that you can find legit sandwich monuments like this one. Here, you can wash it down with a cold brew made in the room on the other side of the wall, and that's pretty cool.



BLTG at the Goodwich
Now that the Goodwich has moved on up from a Las Vegas Boulevard streetside kiosk to a real restaurant space with a real kitchen and plenty of place to sit and eat every sandwich these guys make, it doesn't really make sense that any other Las Vegas sandwich shop could be the best. Nobody does it like this. These meals are creative, make use of the best ingredients and never go too far in search of the best combinations. The BLTG is the Goodwich take on a classic bacon-lettuce-tomato. How is it different? The bacon is made in-house, and it's meaty and not too salty or smoky. The lettuce is actually leafy, dark greens, fresh from the garden. The tomato is juicy and ripe and actually tastes like a tomato. And the cheddar bacon grits are creamy and rich and ... oh wait, did we forget to mention there are cheddar bacon grits on this freaking sandwich? Yeah, that's the G. Combine it all with slightly tangy house-made aioli on thick slabs of olive oil-toasted bread and you've got a lunch to remember. And now, it's much easier to get that lunch. Downtown Vegas, you are one lucky son of a gun.



O.M.G. at LVB Burgers & Bar
So we popped into LVB (the burger bar that has replaced BLT Burger at the Mirage hotel-casino on the Vegas Strip) in its very early days to check out the goods. Why make the trip to the Strip just to eat a pricey burg? Because chef Michael LaPlaca (from Mirage's stellar Portofino Italian restaurant) designed this menu, and he's one of our favorites. So of course we had to get the weirdest burger on that menu: the O.M.G. (which apparently stands for Oh My Gosh) is founded on a ground duck patty stuffed with Muenster cheese and topped with heirloom tomato, watercress, smoked ketchup and roasted duck mayo. Note the quality sesame seed bun, too. So can you actually taste all this funky duck flavors? Pretty much. It's really rich and will fill you up faster than the average burger, and there's a lot of cheese. These aren't bad things. The tomato and ketchup bring some fresh flavors into the mix, but they don't really lighten it up. Is this an indicator that we'll be back to LVB? Yes.

Secret Sunday Chicken

Secret Sunday Chicken at Carson Kitchen
Here's a not-so-secret secret: The people behind Carson Kitchen, arguably the best and most cool restaurant in downtown Las Vegas, are opening a new restaurant out in Henderson this summer. We are excited about that. Similarly, this fabulous fried chicken sandwich at Carson Kitchen is not really a secret, despite its name, and it certainly isn't surprising that it's delicious. Puffy brioche with butter lettuce, spicy pickle aoli and a crunchy—not crispy, crunchy—chicken breast makes for quite the bite. Everybody's doing fried chicken sandwiches and it seems the best ones are the simple ones.


Tuna Melt Sickness

The Tuna Melt of Sickness
I've made many questionable sandwiches in my time, and many of those unfortunate experiments have occurred during some sort of illness. Why? Because when I'm sick, I'm a huge baby, and while I may have good fresh food to eat in the house, I'm lazy and whiny and much more likely to throw a few ingredients between bread. Hence, this tuna melt, a sad byproduct of my annual week-long summer cold. Two tiles of generic multigrain bread were tossed into a pan with a little olive oil, flipped, layered with thick slices of Muenster cheese and a few forkfuls of Starkist Tuna Creations Sweet & Spicy flavor—I don't recall purchasing that fish envelope, for the record—and then plastered together and griddled 'til toasty. It actually doesn't sound that bad, but it was. Cheese didn't get melted enough. Tuna flavoring was a poor choice for sandwiching. Dryness was inescapable. But hey, on the plus side, I still can't really taste anything. I will survive.


The Mayor of Flavortown Burger

The Mayor of Flavortown Burger at Guy Fieri's Vegas Kitchen & Bar
The thing I notice most about the food at Guy Fieri's Las Vegas restaurants—there are two now—is the presentation. This burger is not just put together. It's carefully constructed for maximum height and to make sure it looks like you could never get your mouth around it, but it also needs to be a bit sloppy, as if the kitchen crew didn't use any tweezers placing a single strand of the caraway seed coleslaw intentionally out of place. And the fries, even ... they're not in an kind of container. They're just pile-mounted onto a metal frame with a piece of paper holding them up. It's quite scientific. It's pretty tasty, too, especially if you can manage to order this sucker by name without giggling. The burger is good quality meat, smash-grilled for juiciness and nicely textured outside (but mine was just a bit overdone), and piled with pastrami, Swiss cheese, that slaw, pickles, fried onion strings and Dijon mustard, all on top of a garlic-buttered pretzel bun. All those flavors get a little bit muddled; it still tastes like a burger first and foremost. But you do get little tingles of the 'strami and the pickles and the mustard, and the chewy bun makes it even more satisfying. This probably isn't the best burger at Guy's first Vegas spot, but it's pretty close to being on the money.



Dallas at Bobby's Burger Palace
Perhaps it was inevitable. When Bobby Flay expanded his Burger Palace chain to the Las Vegas Strip, we didn't really care, until we went and ate the burgers (and drank the shakes) and goddamnit if we didn't love this place. The fancy burgers were a little less expansive and a little less fancy than the other casino burger shops, and it was glorious. So we kept coming back. But at last, disappointment. We ordered the Dallas, allegedly a spice-crusted patty with coleslaw, jack cheese, barbecue sauce and pickles, and we "crunchified" it by adding potato chips because even though this seems ridiculous, it has worked for us in the past. This was just short of a titanic fail. I don't know what spices were crusted on this burger, but salt was the only thing we could taste. Combine some Lay's and a runny barbecue sauce that was more savory and steak sauce-ish than sweet and tangy, and you have a one-note salt bomb from which there is no escape. Pickles usually make everything better but this just wasn't going to happen. The meat, though cooked medium rare, was bland and mushy on the inside. We'll always have fond memories of Bobby's, but with Shake Shack, Fatburger and Fukuburger within Strip walking distance of this shop, I don't think we'll be able to find a reason to return. It was yum while it lasted.


Buttermilk Fried Chicken

Buttermilk Fried Chicken at Bruxie
When this thing was brought out to me, I was less than excited. You can't just call something a sandwich if it's not, and the combo of fried chicken and waffles—though unanimously delicious—does not just become a sandwich because you say so. But then I picked this thing up, California chain Bruxie's original and most popular offering of a buttermilk fried chicken breast with cider slaw and chili honey plopped into a light, crisp, Belgian waffle, folded it over, and took a few bites, and it did in fact behave like a sandwich. Mostly. Though Bruxie does manage to mitigate the sweetness of the waffle, the texture is a bit dry and crumbly, and the flavor is muddled. But the airyness of the waffle is a fine complement to the crispy breading of the chicken, creating a nice texture in each bite. The chicken itself is stellar, juicy and tender inside and seasoned well outside. The slaw is a little odd at first, and there's not much of it, but the chili honey goes a long way in bringing everything together. Bruxie, a new addition to the Las Vegas Strip, has potential. My guess is this basic chicken waffle sandwich is only the starting point and tastier options await. To be continued.


Regular Combo Beef & Sausage

Regular Combo Beef & Sausage at Al's Italian Beef

Chili Cheese Grilled Dog

Chili Cheese Grilled Dog at Burger King
Pretty genius, actually ... the other fast-food burger chains don't do dogs. Why not throw this mess on the menu for a couple bucks? Some sucker will tack it on to their Whopper meal order. Some sucker indeed.


Chick'n Shack

Chick'n Shack at Shake Shack
This fried chicken sandwich craze isn't going away any time soon, and that's fine by us ... as long as quality chains like Shake Shack are jumping on the bandwagon and churning out delicious as-they-should-be birdwiches. Originally a special limited-time dish before being joyfully added to the full-time Shack menu, the Chick'n Shack is a 100 percent all-natural cage-free chicken breast with a thin but crunchy outer layer of goodness, planted on a cushy potato bun with lettuce, pickles, and buttermilk-herb mayo. The chicken is thick and juicy, the crust packs a proper amount of crisp texture to balance the soft bun in every bite, the good-sized pickle coins provide ample brine support, and the mayo feels more like a ranch-type sauce than a mayo. The sauce pleasantly brings this sandwich together. It's no surprise the Shack does chicken right ... this hip franchise has established itself as one of our most consistent sandwich stops.


The French Dip

The French Dip at Therapy
It's hard not to order a French dip for lunch when you see it on a menu, even if you're having lunch in a place that probably doesn't specialize in French dips ... say, a hip downtown bar, where you should probably get a charred kale salad or baked ricotta gnudi or a chicken and red velvet waffle slider. But really, don't you just want a French dip? This one is serviceable, bolstered by delectable horseradish cream and high quality roast beef. The jus was savory and fine, as well, but there was something missing. It was the hoagie roll. It wasn't toasted well, as advertised, and you need a little more crisp, toasty goodness on your French dip if it's going to stand up to all that juicy meat and an extra dip. Whatever. Still not going to get the salad.


Lahm Bi Ajeen

Lahm Bi Ajeen at Khoury's



Fatburger at Fatburger
How is it possible that in more than five years of allsandwich we've never reviewed one of our all-time favorite burger joints? Crazy, huh? Yet here it is, for the first time, the classic Fatburger. This is the Medium Fatburger, to be precise, since these days they come in five different sizes; it's plenty big, though. It's got the works—mustard, relish, onions, pickles, tomato, lettuce, mayo, plus added cheese—decorating a 5.3-ounce patty of fresh, beef, griddled to near crispyness on the outside. (The Large Fat is a half-pounder, and then it just gets crazy from there.) I've been eating Fatburgers in Las Vegas for more than 20 years and it's always good; its consistency is second only to In-N-Out. It's a messy delicious treat—the combination of condiments and the overwhelmingly beefy flavor are the defining factors here—and combined with a thick milkshake and thick-cut "fat fries," this is pure fast-food bliss. We might not have reviewed it until now, but we've been eating it all along.