The New Jersey Sloppy Joe is not the hot loose-meat sandwich the name leads you to expect. It is a chilled deli triple-decker: thin rye, two or three sliced deli meats such as turkey, ham, or roast beef, Swiss, coleslaw, and Russian dressing, layered into a tall, cold, knife-cut stack and served by the pound at South Orange delicatessens. Anyone arriving with the loose-meat sandwich in mind is in the wrong sandwich entirely. The one defining fact here is that nothing about it is sloppy or hot: it is a precise, refrigerated, multi-layer build whose entire character is coolness, structure, and the interplay of cured meat, slaw, and dressing. The hot, saucy ground-beef Sloppy Joe is a separate sandwich on a separate page, and the shared name is a coincidence that has confused people for as long as both have existed.
The craft is in the slicing and the bracing. The rye is shaved thin and used as three slices, not two, because the middle slice is a structural beam: it separates the wet coleslaw and dressing layers from each other so neither floods the bread, and it lets the stack be cut into clean quarters without collapsing, the same engineering logic a club sandwich uses its third slice for. The deli meats are sliced thin and layered so each bite carries all of them rather than one at a time. The coleslaw has to be drained and tight, not dripping, or the thin rye gives way; the Russian dressing is applied as a bound, controlled layer rather than poured, so it seasons without soaking. The result is a sandwich engineered to be made in advance, held cold, sliced to order, and stay architecturally intact from the deli case to the plate.
The variations stay inside the cold-rye-triple-decker idea and mostly change the meats. Common builds run turkey and ham, or roast beef and turkey, with the Swiss, slaw, and Russian dressing held constant; some stack a third meat for a denser version. It belongs to the American lunch-counter and deli classics alongside the bound-salad sandwiches and the simple cold-cut builds, sharing their restraint while standing apart as the layered, chilled member. Those deserve their own articles rather than being crowded in here.