The Hoagie Place
Chicago winters are pretty goddamn draining. There are only so many days in a row of shitty grey blah I can handle before I'm about ready to move to Miami and become a major linchpin in the international drug trade. That's why when you get a random 50-degrees-and-sunny day in the middle of February, you spring to life and start crossing everything off your goddamned bucket list. What's on mine? South Side Sandwiches, motherfucker! Specifically: Sweet Steak!
The Hoagie Place ain't much to look at, just your basic walk-up food shack with just enough indoor space to accommodate the folks in line. I'd imagine the line gets a bit cuckoo when it's really busy, but it was pretty mellow when I got there. Service was a little slow, but according to customer grumbling, that's not the norm here. What is the norm is Chicago-style hoagies done right.
Regular sweet steak, $5.24 with tax, fries included. Goddamn, what a sandwich! I think it's possible this sandwich was my soul mate. It's everything you want in a greasemeat sandwich and then some. Falling somewheres between a barbecue beef and a Philly Cheese Steak, the Sweet Steak comes slathered in sweet steak sauce, onions, peppers, and chopped neon-green sweet pickles; the American cheese almost gets lost amidst all the sweet 'n' meat and the super-soft roll. The fries were fine; I only had a few (fig. 3). Oozy boozy, what a goddamn sandwich! Definitely should have gone with the large size. If I had to ding this place for anything, it's simply for having such great food but nowhere to eat it. I made haste to my car and inhaled it; for once not sitting in my car inhaling compressed air cans! Review by Pumboo Dongo-Dohnoh, February 2020
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