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Few words in the English language have the onomatopoeic satisfaction of “slop.” Its opening consonants evoke sludge and slipperiness, the round “O” and smacking “P” the liquid wallop of a viscous substance hitting a surface at speed. Pigs eat slop. Clogged sinks overflow with it. A.I. engines generate it. It’s not a term of charm or refinement, yet at Farley’s, a new counter-service restaurant in Bed-Stuy specializing in sloppy-joe sandwiches, it takes on a mantle of respect, even reverence. “Do you want the slop on the sandwich?” you might be asked, on ordering lunch to go. The alternative is to have the slop portioned out into a takeout soup container, and the sandwich bun packaged separately—when you’re ready to sit down and eat, you can do the slopping yourself. If you waffle on your order—torn, say, between a traditional sandwich and the menu’s several innovative ones—you might be praised for finally making your pick with a phrase possibly never uttered before the opening of this restaurant: “That’s a good slop.”
The sloppy joe is an unsung icon of Americana cooking, several rungs down the ladder of respectability from its more celebrated quick-serve cousins, such as the hamburger and the chili dog. The sandwich, featuring ground meat—generally beef—suspended in a thick, sweet tomatoey sauce, has become an avatar of the horrible school lunch, a cliché that tends to go along with hairnets, greasy aprons, and other elements of canteen grotesquerie. “I know how yous kids like ’em sloppy!” a wild-eyed lunch lady in “Billy Madison,” Adam Sandler’s 1995 satire of the idiocy of lower education, cries. This is, of course, a tremendously unfair characterization of the lunch lady, who, given her profession of feeding hungry children, ought to be stereotyped as saintly rather than monstrous. It’s also unfair to the sloppy joe, which even in its most slapdash form is a genuinely delicious construction. My own school-cafeteria memories are mostly of cartilaginous chicken sandwiches, microwaved to tepid inside their individually sealed plastic wrappers. A sloppy joe, slopped to order, even perfunctorily, would’ve been a fantastical treat.
The sandwich’s reputation has been rehabilitated of late, in fits and starts. There’s a solid, mega-meaty take at the mini-chain Schnipper’s; a terrific vegan version that used to be on the menu at Superiority Burger could have converted even the most skeptical snob or carnivore. But Farley’s, with an all-slop menu and retro stylings, makes the most impassioned argument yet for the sloppy joe’s reconsideration. There are seven types of slop (developed by the restaurant’s co-owners, Samuel Saverance and Matt Buentello, in consultation with the chef Fred Hua), all of them built atop the foundational “mother” sauce of the traditional sloppy joe. The Original Joe—sauce, meat; classic—is a little tangy, the mixture tinted by Worcestershire and noticeably celery-forward. It is good, but not necessarily the sloppy joe of my dreams. Things get more exciting when you sample the variations. The Cubano Joe contains cubed ham mixed in with the slop, along with pickles, Swiss cheese, and yellow mustard. The Cajun Joe embellishes a standard slop with shrimp and chopped andouille sausage, creating something like an étouffée on a roll. The Mekong Joe—my favorite by a mile, and one of the most exciting sandwiches I’ve had this year—is a glorious mishmash of Southeast Asian elements, including aromatic fish sauce, spicy bird’s-eye chiles, bright Thai red curry, and a voluptuous backdrop of coconut; crabmeat mixed into the slop lends an extra funky note.
On-theme décor.
The retro space includes a jukebox.
I find the simplicity of Farley’s whole operation incredibly appealing: there is something to be said for one highly specific idea, executed neatly, packaged with care. The space is tidy and thematic, with a jukebox and black-and-white tile. If you’re thirsty, there are sodas and seltzers; each sandwich comes with a bag of big-brand chips, nothing fancy. (When ordering the Original or the Vegan Joe, which is made with Beyond Meat, I recommend piling Ruffles onto the sandwich; their crunch and puckery saltiness helps zhuzh up the least exciting of the menu’s slops.) Simplicity doesn’t mean a lack of craft; on the contrary, the menu betrays an artisan’s penchant for creative inefficiencies. Though the mother sauce figures in all of the slops, the sandwiches are made with different meats to best serve their themes: tender ground pork conjures the roast pork of a traditional Cubano; ground chicken provides a mild base for the potent spices of the Cajun and the Mekong sandwiches; beef features in a Texas BBQ-inspired version, along with pieces of smoked brisket and a pile of crunchy pickles. The breads get switched up, too: brioche buns here, sesame-seed ones there, sturdy bodega-style kaiser rolls to support the gloopy heft of the Cubano and the Cajun.
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Standing at the counter, waiting for my slops to be slopped, I considered the virtues of the menu’s only other savory offering: a hot dog, draped in your choice of slop. It is, effectively, a chili dog—not that dissimilar, in form or function, from the deeply beloved meat-magma hot-dog-topping chilis of upstate New York, or the polarizing (absurdly so, in my opinion) cinnamon-spiked chili of Cincinnati. For that matter, is the sloppy joe itself all that different from the fiery cumin lamb sandwiches at Xi’an Famous Foods, or the exquisite mince on toast served at London’s legendary St. John? It seems unjust that we haven’t celebrated the sloppy joe as willingly as we’ve celebrated its equally sloppy brethren. Maybe it’s a simple matter of nomenclature: in Iowa, whence the sloppy joe apocryphally originated, it belongs to the broader category of “loose meat sandwich,” which to me is hardly more elegant. I’d like to think we’re not so prejudiced as to dismiss a dish categorically just because its name is a little unrefined. (Would we afford more respect to a Dishevelled Joseph?)
For a recent to-go order, I opted to have my sandwiches pre-slopped, trusting that they’d survive the ten-minute journey back to my apartment without losing any of their (admittedly marginal) structural integrity. The man working the restaurant that day, wearing a peaked white-paper hat like a proper counterman, endorsed my decision: “Yeah, I think the slop will really hold up.” I’m delighted to report that it absolutely did. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
