patty melt people, this is our time to shine
and not just from the grease on our fingers
There are two things I know to be true about patty melts:
They are delicious
I love them
I love them so much that I pitched an article to my editor back in 2018 titled “Go To A Diner And Order A Patty Melt” and I put more time and effort into writing it than I have anything else before or since. It’s important. People need to know how good patty melts are. We’re constantly reminded about cheeseburgers in all their various forms (Smashburgers, Baconators, double Baconators, etc.), which is fine because cheeseburgers are and always will be very good. But patty melts. Remember that.
I apparently am so firmly behind this stance and/or so relentlessly annoying about it in the work chat that the same editor I pitched the piece to over five years ago remembered my passion about the issue this week and sent me an article from the New York Times with this headline: “The Patty Melt Is Tired of Hearing About Your Favorite Burger.” (Sub-hed: “The undersung cousin of an American classic is a superior sandwich, our critic argues.”) And before I even clicked the link I said “HELL YEAH” out loud to no one at my desk.
Finally.
Freaking finally.
Patty melt people, this is our moment.
The piece opens up with stories about restaurants around New York putting patty melts on their menus and having a smash hit on their hands almost immediately. Which, yeah. Duh. This is what I’ve been saying. They’re delicious. Of course they’re selling. The lesson here is to listen to me always.
From the piece, which is absolutely worth a read:
Stranger still, these new patty melts are selling faster than anyone expected. When it appeared this summer, the one at the Commerce Inn was served only after 10 p.m. in the narrow, tapering barroom. Word got out, and now you can have it anytime, no matter where you are sitting. Daily Provisions started cautiously, too, unveiling it last January as a dinner item. By December, it had charmed its way onto the lunch menu.
The patty melt has stood patiently in the shadow of the hamburger for so long that resistance to the ebb and flow of fashion seems to be baked into its being. It is resistant to change in general. Its classic components are few: bread, usually rye; cheese that melts well; browned onions; and, of course, a beef patty. Take one away, or add something else, and the thing you end up with may not be a patty melt.
I’m glad we’re touching on this last point. We’ve seen where these things can go wrong. There’s a little patty melt resurgence and then it gets popular and then it gets written up in a New York Times Trend piece and then four months later some restaurant you could never get a table at puts something on the menu called like “The Elevated Patty Melt” that’s made of marbled ribeye and has truffle foam and microgreens on it for some reason and costs as much as your cell phone bill.
This is why you get patty melts at diners. Only diners. Real diners, too. This part is important. And if you want to be sure the place you’re in is a real diner, well, I’ll just go ahead and blockquote myself from my ode to patty melts that I linked to up there.
A diner must have a huge menu, first of all. Like, distressingly huge. At least 10 pages, with everything from seafood platters to lasagna to waffles, with four or more nightly specials handwritten on cards and inserted into laminated sleeves between pages (bonus points for misspellings, like “Rueben” instead of “Reuben”), all offered every single second the kitchen is open. It must have waitresses that call all the customers “honey” or are openly disdainful of their presence, with no middle ground. It should, preferably, have one cook who seems to be there all day and who cooks everything on the same flat top grill and who is intimidating enough through appearance and/or rumor that you would never dare say something like “I don’t think this is a true patty melt because a true patty melt has caramelized onions and those take over 30 minutes to prepare, whereas these appear to have been merely softened in butter for 10 minutes at most” in his presence for fear of bodily harm. That is what I mean by diner.
Go to a diner and order a patty melt. You don’t even need a good reason. They’re popular now! You can look cool among your friends. “Oh yeah, I’m just gonna run out and hit the patty melt spot.” They’ll be so jealous. Maybe they’ll come with you. Then you’ll both have patty melts. Friends and patty melts aren’t all you need to get through this life, but they sure as hell don’t hurt.
This is how we build a better society.
STUFF I TYPED
— my weekly Rundown column, which opens with a bit about the original creator of True Detective being just outrageously mad about the new season, and also includes a bit about a Dutch wildlife TV host named Professor Freek Vonk discovering a whole new kind of giant snake
— speaking of True Detective and its original creator, let’s just go ahead and say I stand by this thing I wrote back in 2015
— HOUSEKEEPING NOTES:
we’re doing another mailbag next Sunday so if you have questions or rants or whatever you want to send in, just smash reply on this email and shoot them over
it brings me great pleasure to report that I am apparently still on the mailing list for samples of Guy Fieri’s line of spiked juices and teas thanks to one throwaway line I wrote in a blog in 2023
I am very intrigued by “Flavortown Tikitown”
STUFF I CLICKED ON
— my buddy Aaron interviewed Vince Staples about his new Netflix show, which I really do need to hurry up and watch
— I linked to it in the Rundown post above but I need you to read this review of Madame Web
— Paul Giamatti seems like a cool dude
— I have to believe the existence of see-through baseball pants will do wonders for the morale of my beloved torso-exposing dinger-smashing himbo king Philadelphia Phillies
— I love this little man
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— people were freaking out a little that Gmail might be shutting down but it turns out the whole thing started with a dipshit twitter troll, which feels both very stupid and a little too obvious
— help I can’t stop reading articles about the stolen lyrics to Hotel California and how the Eagles still all hate each other very much
— buddy if you leave me a four-minute voice note you had better be doing a drunken version of Margaritaville that I can laugh at for months
— there was a horse on the loose in Philly earlier last week and then a ram on the loose in South Jersey on Friday, which is concerning on a number of levels, especially when you remember that a single raccoon recently knocked out power for a whole chunk of the city, too
— I will not go on the eclipse flight
— Seeing Big Bird without his head sounds horrifying in ways that would scar me permanently even today as a grown adult with back pain
— this is my favorite thing I’ve seen this week
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Okay, that’s it. Please share and consider subscribing so I can increase my patty melt budget.
I think the only way to improve Madame Web was if the person with her mother in the Amazon when she was researching spiders right before she died was Professor Freek Vonk.
Diners Drive Ins and Dives, but it’s just Brian going to places and eating their patty melt