Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Cheap Eats / Restaurants It's Like Elvis Took a Trip to Veracruz
Posted by Chris Chamberlain on Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 1:45 PM
Sometimes you finish a meal which is so unusual and unexpectedly delightful that you really want to tell someone about it right away. I consider myself lucky to have this forum to do just that.
I was meeting someone for lunch at Phat Bites off Donelson Pike. We'd never actually had a FTF experience (no this isn't a Craigslist pickup story), so I scanned the restaurant for someone who looked expectant while I stood in line to order. I did not pay the requisite attention to the many chalkboards and signs which cover the walls and pass for a menu at Phat Bites. The queue moved faster than I anticipated and I found myself being that guy I hate at the front of the line, utterly unprepared and surprised to be there.
I glanced at the special board and saw only one sandwich, "The WTF." Not wanting to take up any more time, I blurted "will I like the WTF?" The bemused Reubenista said "I don't know. It's a strange one."
Upon closer inspection, I had to agree. The small print described the sandwich as containing organic peanut butter, smoked bacon, banana, cucumber and fresh jalapeños on toasted raisin bread. But WTF...if I didn't order it, I sure wasn't going to try to make it at home. So alea iacta est.
An hour later as I sit here at my keyboard, my mouth is still glowing with the residual burn of the peppers. Their heat was immediately countered by the icy cool of the cucumbers, but while the jalapeños lost the immediate capsaicin battle, they won the war. The smoky crunch of the perfectly cooked peppered bacon combined with the creamy peanut butter and banana to make me think that Gladys Presley was on her "A" game when she first came up with that one for her baby boy. As a bonus the peanut butter mortared the bacon in place, preventing it from falling out the back of the sandwich or giving in entirely to the first bite like the trollop we know pork likes to be.
The toasted raisin bread was an excellent choice to carry this concoction, dense enough to hold it all together without too many holes for the peanut butter to escape through. The only downside was that the WTF is not a regular menu item at Phat Bites. You'll just have to keep trying until you find it or maybe it is worth a try in your home kitchen.
Comments (4)
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Very impressive! I love that Elvis panini at Patterson House, and I love spicy things, so perhaps I would love this?? hmmm....
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English cucumbers, so no burpy seeds. Added crunch and cooled off the pepper of the bacon and, well, the peppers.
If I made it myself, which I intend to, I'll make one with cukes as a control and one without for comparison.
We're thinking that small rounds of these would be an awesome bus snack for the Artrageous Van Go shuttles.
