The hot open-face turkey sandwich gives up the second slice of bread and, with it, the idea that a sandwich is held in the hand. Sliced roast turkey is laid over one slice of soft white bread, the whole plate flooded with hot turkey gravy, with mashed potatoes alongside and a spoonful of cranberry sauce on the side. The defining element is the gravy, not the turkey. What separates this from the Hot Brown, which binds its turkey under a cheese-enriched Mornay and sets it under a broiler, is that this build is not broiled and not bound: it is simply drowned. The gravy is poured at the pass and the sandwich is eaten immediately, before the bread underneath has finished surrendering, with a knife and fork off a plate it shares with the potatoes.
The craft is in timing against a base that is designed to fail. The bread is plain soft white, not toasted hard, because the point is for it to soak the gravy and go tender rather than hold a structure; the sandwich is meant to be cut, not lifted, so the bread's job is to absorb and yield, not to brace. That makes timing everything. Poured to order and eaten at once, the bottom slice is gravy-saturated but still intact under the fork; left to sit, it dissolves into the plate and the sandwich becomes a spoon dish. The turkey is sliced and laid flat so the gravy reaches every part and so each forkful gets meat, soaked bread, and sauce together. The mashed potatoes are not a side so much as a second target for the same gravy, and the cranberry is the only acid and the only cold thing on an otherwise hot, soft, savory plate, cutting a build that would otherwise read as one heavy note. This is diner and steam-table food: turkey and gravy held hot all day, plated and flooded in seconds when the order lands, fast because the assembly is three motions and a ladle.
It sits in the open-face and hot-plate family alongside the Mornay-bound Hot Brown, the cheese-sauce horseshoe, and the hot roast beef plate, each making a different choice about what floods the single slice. Those are their own articles rather than being crowded in here.