Spiedie Sub

Everything that makes a spiedie a spiedie happens a full day before the grill is lit. Cubes of chicken, pork, or lamb go into a thin, biting bath of vinegar and oil sharpened with garlic and mint, and they sit there overnight or longer while the acid works inward. Skip that soak and the rest of the build cannot save it: the cube grills dry and one-note inside a hard char, tasting of fire and nothing underneath. Done right, the marinade reaches the centre, so the meat comes off the skewer juicy under a blistered exterior, the dressing standing in for any sauce a sandwich would normally need.

The plain Binghamton spiedie stops there, and it is deliberately bare: hot cubes pulled off the stick and folded into a single slice of soft bread, eaten off the grill. The sub is the same cubes asked to anchor a built hero instead of being the entire meal. That shift puts demands on the bread the plain version never makes.

A long, structured roll has to hold a wet, oiled, charred load without bowing. Onions and peppers cooked soft and sweet on the same flat-top fill the gaps around the firm meat so each bite catches both at once, holding the load together as much as they season it. A little extra marinade brushed into the crust seasons the bread without flooding it, and the roll comes to the counter dressed but not yet soaked.

Push any part too far and the hero comes apart in a way the spare original never could. Pile the cubes into a roll with no crust strength and the bottom splits at the seam under the weight. Cook the peppers and onions to slop and they soak the crumb to mush; pull them too early and they crunch raw against tender meat. A roll too soft turns to paste under the dressing, while one too hard fights the cubes and scrapes the roof of the mouth instead of giving way to them. The plain skewer forgives a lot because it carries so little; the loaded roll forgives almost nothing.

It comes off the flat-top warm, grill lines pressed into the crust, smelling of char and vinegar and toasted garlic at once. The marinade lands before the meat does, sharp and herbal, then the chicken gives tender under its char, then sweet soft onion arrives behind. Oil from the dressing slicks the fingertips at the seam, a pepper strip slides loose, a stray cube drops back to the paper. The crust crackles at the first squeeze, and the back of the roll eats wetter than the front as the vegetables bleed their juice into the bread.

Ordering it carries a Binghamton accent even now. Most people call for chicken by default, though older regulars still ask for pork or lamb, and the rooms that built the dish, Sharkey's among them, move it by the stick, by the pound of marinated meat, and across the cook-off tables at the Spiedie Fest each summer. Asking for it on a roll with onions and peppers rather than folded plain marks out the loaded version, the one that turned a backyard-grill staple into food you sit down to eat.

The splits run along the meat and the dressing. Chicken is the everyday pick; pork and lamb are the older calls that take the marinade in their own way, and some shops melt provolone over the cubes or work in a hot pepper relish to lean the whole thing toward a grinder. A chicken parm hero rides the same roll but is a separate sandwich, breaded and sauced where this one is marinated and charred. Strip it back to one soft slice and a bare stick and it is no longer a sub at all; it has gone back to being the plain spiedie, marinated meat and the bread to hold it.

Two men, one skewer

The spiedie reached Binghamton with Italian immigrants in the 1920s, its name taken from the Italian spiedo, a cooking spit. The marinated cube on a skewer is the documented form; setting it on a long roll with grilled vegetables came later, as an extension of a sandwich that was already local.

Two founding claims sit beside each other, both real and neither settled. Agostino "Augie" Iacovelli was serving spiedies at his Endicott restaurant by 1939, steeping the meat in a mix he called zuzu of vinegar, water, lemon, garlic, and mint. Peter Sharak began serving his at Sharkey's in Binghamton in 1947 and the bar still bills itself as the dish's birthplace. Who invented it and who merely made it famous is the local argument, and the earlier dated restaurant belongs to Iacovelli.

Where the dish stayed put is the part nobody disputes. It barely travelled past the Southern Tier, and Binghamton has kept it close enough to throw an annual Spiedie Fest and Balloon Rally every summer since 1983, a festival built around a sandwich almost no one outside a handful of New York counties grew up eating.