Saturday, March 14th, 2009

30 Rock Sandwiches Solved

Hello. Caroline here.

Last year, there was an episode of 30 Rock that got our mouths watering. It was titled “Sandwich Day” and the plot centered around the Teamsters bringing the most tantalizingly delicious subs, hoagies, grinders, heros, what-have-you, to the office, sending the writers’, actors’ and crew’s heads into a flavor-induced tailspin. In the episode’s climactic final scene, Tina Fey’s character Liz Lemon chooses to devour the entire sandwich at an airport security checkpoint, rather than part with it and it’s special gravy. Watching it, you got the sense that this scenario was based on reality. The details were too perfect: Teamsters, secret outer-borough location (the Teamsters would not tell anyone where the sandwich was from, and only brought them to the office once a year) and, the dead giveaway: a dipping sauce so good you want to drink it.

We made it our mission to find out where this place was and eat all of their sandwiches.

If you troll around the interweb, you’ll read a lot of people theorizing that it’s Defonte’s in Red Hook, Brooklyn, which now has a location on Third Avenue in Manhattan. But in a happy and one might say, karmic, coincidence, I happen to have a very good friend who’s husband works on the set of 30 Rock. And because we don’t want to put the affable husband in the middle of some sort of angry Teamster sandwich, we have agreed to a veil of confidentiality, and my friend will henceforth be known as M and her husband as, The Husband.

Soon after seeing the 30 Rock episode in question, I contacted M and asked her if The Husband knew anything about this sandwich, whether it was in fact something that was shared with the cast and crew, and if so, had he tasted it and its accompanying sauce. At first, The Husband was cagey in response to our requests