Chinese Roast Pork Sandwich

After the last show at the hotel nightclubs around Loch Sheldrake, New York, the Catskills comics and singers drove to Herbie's for a Chinese roast pork sandwich on garlic bread. The comedian Freddie Roman remembered the place as the spot where the entertainers gathered once the stages went dark, and the sandwich was what they ordered. It arrived in two halves, cut on the diagonal, with a kosher dill spear alongside and the garlic already working through the bread. A room of performers who had just finished two shows came for a plate of roast pork, garlic bread, and a pickle.

The pork is char siu, the red-lacquered Cantonese roast, sliced thin, on a deli slicer where one was available, so each leaf of meat carries a sticky sweet edge and a little warm fat. The loaf underneath is Italian bread, split, painted with mashed garlic and oil or butter, and toasted until the cut face goes golden and the whole sandwich smells of garlic before it reaches the table. The first bite is hot bread, crackling at the edge with a soft center, then the salty-sweet pork, then the garlic coming up the back of the nose. A squiggle of duck sauce, apricot-sweet and gluey, and a bead of Chinese hot mustard that clears the sinuses go on top, and the pickle is the reset between bites.

The sandwich is three restaurant cuisines sharing one plate. The pork comes from the Chinese kitchen, the garlic bread from the Italian-American red-sauce tradition, the pickle and the diagonal-cut deli presentation from the Jewish delicatessen. In the Catskills those three were never far apart: the resorts served a mostly Jewish clientele, and Chinese restaurants were a familiar weekend meal for that crowd, so a resort town could easily have a place that sold chow mein, pastrami, and garlic bread under one roof. Put the three on a roll and the logic is obvious in the eating, since the salt and sugar of the pork want the fat of garlic butter, and the dill wants something sweet to cut.

Once vacationers carried the order home, it settled into Brooklyn. Accounts place it at Martin's and Senior's on Nostrand Avenue in Sheepshead Bay and say it spread through the southern tier, from Canarsie through Mill Basin to Bay Ridge, until nearly every diner and coffee shop made one. Herbie's itself later opened a Brooklyn restaurant, Herbie's International, in the Flatlands section. The kosher delis that kept the sandwich going swapped the pork for roasted veal, brushed the bread with olive oil, and dropped the duck sauce, which is how a Chinese roast pork sandwich ended up on the menu of a kitchen that never cooks a pig.

The knife work matters more than the recipe suggests. Cut thick, char siu turns chewy and its glaze reads as candy; cut paper-thin and stacked loosely, it stays tender and lets the garlic bread show through between the layers. The garlic needs to be fresh and mashed, because powder bakes into a dusty bitterness that the sweet pork amplifies. And the sandwich has to go out hot, since a cooled garlic loaf hardens at the crust and the pork fat goes waxy against the roof of the mouth.

Origin and history

Herbie's in Loch Sheldrake, a Chinese, Italian, and deli restaurant in Sullivan County, gets the credit most often, and the usual dating is the mid-1950s. A 1964 New York Post advertisement for Herbie's announced the Loch Sheldrake restaurant opening for the season on June 25th, which fixes the place in print though it says nothing of the menu. Irwin Richman's 1998 book Borscht Belt Bungalows says Herbie's created a sensation by introducing the Chinese roast pork on garlic bread sandwich. Richman's 2001 volume describes the restaurant packed with people looking for its famed Chinese roast pork sandwich.

Rival claims circulate in comment threads: a family said to have owned Singer's, a combination deli and Chinese restaurant in Liberty, New York, says it invented the recipe, and another commenter credits her parents' store in Parksville in the early 1960s. No record names a first cook. The Triangle Diner in Liberty, across from the entrance to Grossinger's, is remembered by Liberty High School alumni as a place to eat the sandwich.

In November 2016 the critic Robert Sietsema went looking for the sandwich in the Catskills for Eater, in a piece headlined as the swan song of the RPG there; it began with a friend from Ellenville who remembered eating one in the early 1980s. By then the sandwich survived mostly in Brooklyn and Queens kosher delis and on South Shore Long Island diner menus, sixty-odd years after Herbie's first put garlic bread under a pile of char siu.