Cleveland Polish Boy

Start with a link of grilled kielbasa in a soft roll and you are barely a third of the way to a Polish Boy. On top of the sausage goes a heap of french fries, laid right across the meat. On top of the fries goes a scoop of cold coleslaw. Over all of it goes a heavy pour of sauce, barbecue or a cayenne-red hot sauce, until it runs down into the fries and pools at the bottom of the roll. The result is a barbecue plate stacked vertically into a bun. Some shops deep-fry the kielbasa after grilling so the skin crisps before it disappears under everything else.

The build is engineered to defeat itself, and that is the joke and the appeal. A neat sandwich is not the goal here. The fries soften where the sauce hits them and stay crisp at the edges where it has not reached yet, so a single bite can run from crunchy to soggy. The cold slaw cuts the heat of the sausage and the burn of the hot sauce with vinegar and a little sweetness. The roll is doing the hardest job, soaking sauce from below and bearing weight from above, and it loses. You eat the top with your hands and finish the collapse with a fork.

It hits every register at once, which is the case for it. There is smoke and char off the grilled kielbasa, salt and starch from the fries, a cold crunch and a vinegar snap from the slaw, and over all of it the sweetness of barbecue sauce or the slow cayenne heat of the hot-sauce version. The textures fight: a snap of sausage skin, then soft fry, then crisp fry, then wet slaw. It is hot and cold in the same mouthful. Nothing about it is restrained, and the people who love it would tell you restraint was never on the menu.

The line between a Polish Boy and a Polish Girl is one ingredient and worth getting right. A Polish Girl is a Polish Boy with pulled or chopped smoked pork added on top of the kielbasa, two pork products in one roll, a version that took hold at places like Mabel's. Swap the kielbasa for an all-beef frankfurter and keep the fries, slaw, and barbecue sauce and you have what the Map Room calls a Drew Carey, after the Cleveland comedian. None of these is a plain kielbasa sandwich; the load is the whole identity, and a bare grilled sausage on a bun is a different and lesser thing in this city.

Cleveland treats it as a civic object, and the ordering grammar is loose but real. The first question is barbecue or hot, and the hot-sauce camp runs deep at the old soul-food rib houses on the East Side. Hot Sauce Williams ran its version through cayenne rather than a sweet glaze; Seti Martinez built a following selling them off a truck at Dean Supply, and the chef Michael Symon named Seti's the best thing he ever ate on the Food Network. It is sold from rib joints, food trucks, and bar kitchens far more than from anywhere with tablecloths, and that is part of what it means.

The Mount Pleasant Origin of the Polish Boy

The Polish Boy has an origin story that is unusually well attested for a street sandwich, because the family is still telling it. The credit goes to Virgil Whitmore, who ran a barbecue business in Cleveland's Mount Pleasant neighborhood starting in the 1940s. By the account of his grandson Larry Turner, who now runs Mt. Pleasant BBQ, Whitmore put together a bun, a sausage, coleslaw, fries, and barbecue sauce out of what he already had on the line, and a loaded sandwich came out of it.

The name points back further than the sandwich, to the Polish wards that gave Cleveland its kielbasa. Poles began settling the city's near East Side in numbers from the 1870s, and the Warszawa neighborhood around St. Stanislaus, whose church building went up in 1881, grew into one of the largest Polish enclaves in the country. The kielbasa was already a neighborhood staple when Whitmore reached for it; what no record fixes is exactly when or why Polish Boy became the name for a sandwich the Black rib houses of the East Side made their own, hot sauce and all.

The dish stayed local for half a century before the country noticed it. Whitmore's moved to a busier stand at East 85th and Cedar, and the sandwich passed from there to Hot Sauce Williams, Steve's Lunch, and eventually the food trucks. National attention came in 2008, when Esquire put Freddie's Southern Style Rib House on its list of the best sandwiches in America and printed the line that stuck to the whole dish, soul on white.