Roast Pork Italian

At the counter someone is shaving pork off a roasted shoulder that has been carved down most of the morning, and a ladle of dark pan jus goes over the pile before the roll closes. That jus is what the sandwich is built to deliver. The shoulder is cooked low and long with garlic, rosemary and fennel until the connective tissue surrenders and the meat pulls into wet, tender strands, sliced thin so it stays pliable rather than seizing into rope. Sharp provolone goes on against the hot meat and half-melts into it. A tangle of broccoli rabe, blanched and then sauteed hard in garlic and oil, comes on top still bitter. The long roll soaks the jus and carries the seasoning of the roast into every bite.

The broccoli rabe does real structural work here. It is not a green tucked in for color. The pork is fatty, deeply seasoned and soft; the rabe answers it with a vegetal bitterness and a bit of chew, and the aged provolone, chosen sharp rather than mild, leans on both. Pull those two out and what remains is a plain pork roll, pleasant and forgettable. Build them in and the bite arrives hot, sharp, bitter and fatty at once, none of the three parts giving the others room to dominate.

The bread settles the question of whether any of this survives the walk to a table. A Philadelphia long roll runs tender through the crumb with a crust that has spine, and it has to, because the filling is heavy and wet and three layers deep. The counter hand often dips the cut faces of the roll in the jus or spoons more over the meat, which means the bread is seasoned through and softening from the first second it is assembled. Eat it fast. The roll is winning a race against its own filling, and given a few minutes the jus wins.

The smell at one of these shops is pork fat and roasting garlic, and it carries out the door before the counter does. Inside, the rabe hits a hot pan with the oil already smoking and the garlic going gold, and the sound of it cuts under the order-taking. A finished sandwich runs warm and faintly greasy in the hand, the provolone gone slack and stringy where it met the meat, the first bite delivering the bitter green and the fat-soft pork and the salt of the jus together while steam comes off the cut end. It is a sandwich that is hot all the way through, not warm in spots.

In Philadelphia the roast pork Italian travels under a standing piece of advice: the locals will tell a visitor to skip the cheesesteak and order this instead. It is the city's other sandwich, less photographed and more fiercely defended, the one that turns up in the line at John's on Snyder Avenue and at DiNic's inside Reading Terminal Market with regulars who order by muscle memory. The shorthand is roast pork, sharp, with rabe, and a counter hand in South Philadelphia knows exactly what that means and how fast to move. The cheesesteak gets the tourists; the roast pork gets the argument over which one a Philadelphian would actually pick.

The Bucci and Nicolosi counters

The roast pork Italian grew out of South Philadelphia's Italian immigrant kitchens, where porchetta and the leftover Sunday pork roast were already on the table; the move was putting the sliced roast and its juices on a long roll. Domenico Bucci, an immigrant from Abruzzo who came through Ellis Island in 1918, catered weddings around the city first from home and then from a bus, and in 1930 he set up a stand on a triangular lot leased from the B&O Railroad selling two things, a meatball hero and a pork sandwich. He named it for his son, John. The shop still stands at 14 East Snyder Avenue as John's Roast Pork, run by Bucci's grandson John Bucci Jr.

The provolone and the greens came later and from the family. It was the younger John Bucci who added sharp provolone and sauteed spinach to his grandfather's plain pork roll in the 1970s, and competing shops answered by swapping in bitter broccoli rabe for the spinach, which is the version most people now picture. The James Beard Foundation named John's Roast Pork an America's Classic in 2006, a rare nod for a sandwich counter rather than a dining room.

The rabe version got its loudest endorsement across town. DiNic's traces to the South Philadelphia butcher shop Gaetano Nicolosi opened in 1918; his descendants formalized the sandwich business in 1977, joining the Nicolosi and DiClaudio names into DiNic's, and set up inside Reading Terminal Market. In 2012, on the finale of Adam Richman's Best Sandwich in America on the Travel Channel, the DiNic's roast pork with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe beat nine regional finalists, among them a Philadelphia cheesesteak, and took the show's national title.