“How ’bout a nice greasy pork sandwich served in a dirty ashtray?”

– from Weird Science (1985)

Back in the sandwich world, the classics here, of course, being the milanesa, essentially a weiner schnitzel on bread, and the choripan, a grilled chorizo, butterflied, and also served on bread. Typical condiments – chimichurri or salsa criolla. But there are some variants on the latter, in particular the morci-pan, a morcilla (blood sausage) done the same way (some folk just scoop the insides of the sausage out and spread them on the bread; the lomito, a steak sandwich; the bondi-pan, grilled pork shoulder, usually well splashed with lemon; and, the chivi-pan, grilled goat – much less common, but I do see them now and again; and a few random others – smoked salchicha parrillera, chinchulines, various other innards. In general, my favorite place for these kind of sandwiches is the Costanera Norte.

Over time, quite a few people have recommended checking out Parrilla El 22 at the corner of Godoy Cruz and Jufre in Palermo as an inexpensive and quite good parrilla. Now, I can’t writeup any kind of full review, my friend and I each ordered the same thing, a bondi-pan, which was what we’d headed there for. I also ordered a morcilla, because I like them. The latter, on its own, not bad, but I did the scoop it out thing and added it to my bondi-pan because it needed some serious flavor. Unseasoned, gristly and fatty, it was among the lesser quality bondiolas I’ve experienced here in BA. The bread was the typical, flavorless white bread that is just too common here. The quite good and even slightly spicy chimichurri and nicely garlicky salsa criolla (a nice touch, usually it’s just onion, tomato and bell peppers) provided the flavor as well, but in truth good as they were, they were just coverups for a poor quality sandwich. No question it was lots of food for little money – I think the sandwiches were 18 pesos, and huge, but sort of the reverse of the old Borscht Belt joke – “The food here is terrible.” “Yes, and such small portions.” In this case, too much of a mediocre thing leaves me doubtful as to the likelihood of going back to try something else….