Top sandwiches on Long Island

Yes, yes — you are perfectly capable of making a delicious sandwich. But there are times when it’s best to leave it to professionals, and here on Long Island you’ll find some folks at the very top of their game, turning out everything from the mightiest of heros to a light yet satisfying banh mi. Here are five truly outstanding sandwiches — and each one of them tells a story:

Brendos King of Heros, Williston Park

When you call yourself the King of Heros, you better produce a sandwich worthy of the title. To do so, Brendan Banks made a bold move when he opened his Williston Park shop last year: Brendos King of Heros eschews Boar’s Head, Schaller & Weber, “deli meats” of any kind. The only cold cuts are proper salumi — capicola, mortadella, soppressata — from nearby Ceriello’s Fine Foods. For the first few months, the only poultry was house-fried chicken cutlets, but he recently added turkey, now that he has reconfigured the kitchen to roast his own turkey breast. “We’ve seen it with pizza, we’ve seen it with burgers. Now,” he declared, “it’s time for the sandwich to step up.”

Indeed, all over Long Island, sandwiches are stepping way up, using better fillings, better bread and better flavor combinations to reach gustatory heights that used to be the exclusive province of, well, foods you need a knife and fork to eat.

Take The Crown sandwich at Brendos. Cut it in half and you’ll see an expanse of thinly sliced medium-rare roast beef barely contained by its roll. What you will perceive only by biting into it are the other ingredients, pressed into almost invisible service of that beef: bacon cut to the exact length of the roll, that bread’s cut surface brushed with garlic oil and briefly toasted, a subtle melt of Cheddar and a kick of horseradish, some onion straws for texture. It’s perfect. And even more perfect when you dip it into the jus served alongside. The pastel-hued Wild West Turkey also holds surprises, the roseate tomatoes mingling with chipotle aioli, the spring-green of avocado and lettuce, all softened and sharpened by Cheddar and banana pepper.

Maggie's Eatery, Miller Place

Tyler Hannibal is engaged in the same enterprise. His 10-month-old Maggie’s Eatery is a casual spot without any airs, but his chef’s chops inform each of the six sandwiches on his regular menu. Again, no cold cuts. And no custom creations, either. “I want a tight menu,” he said, “and I want to design the sandwiches to make them the best.” His goal is to put together appealing ingredients in a way that “stretches my customers — but not too far.”

Hannibal’s roast beef sandwich is an altogether looser version than Banks’ — take it to go at your own peril. Instead of shaved rib eye, here are meaty slices of marinated skirt steak reposing on a bed of spicy arugula and buried under melted mozzarella and fried onions. The avocado toast here is next-level: Anchored on toasted ciabatta, it gilds the avocado lily with arugula, radish and “everything seasoning,” and you can up the ante with a confetti of queso fresco and a fried egg.

There is no great sandwich without great bread. For Hannibal, ciabatta is “the champion.” This Italian bread is elliptical — not round — in cross-section so it makes a sleeker sandwich. The crust is sturdy, and the interior has an open crumb. “It’s perfect,” he said. “The airy texture inside absorbs the ingredients, but the crust keeps everything clean and in check.”

An East Hampton native, Hannibal has spent his culinary life on Long Island — for a decade he was executive chef of Bostwick’s Chowder House in East Hampton and its siblings, Bostwick’s on the Harbor and Indian Wells Tavern — and Suffolk County is in his bones.

Smartwich, Hicksville

The influences run farther and wider at Smartwich, a two-year-old shop wedged into a corner of Francesco’s Bakery in Hicksville where Michael Guerrieri takes "all of my years and gastronomic experience and consolidate them between two pieces of bread.”

He was born outside of Naples and raised in Plainview, the son and brother of bakers (his father and brother run Francesco’s). His Italian heritage was his first influence. Then, as a young man, he did high-end catering in Manhattan. But his business sense and his palate came of age during 17 years in Lisbon, Portugal, where he owned both a fancy restaurant, Mezzaluna, and a sandwich shop, City Sandwich. Returning to New York, he renamed the concept Smartwich, operating branches in the Theater District, the East Village and Wall Street before COVID struck.

Just as his shop in Lisbon brought a stars-and-stripes sensibility to Portugal, in Hicksville, he is waving the Portuguese flag. Smartwiches (you’ll earn a gentle rebuke if you call them sandwiches), he said, are “a stealth means of getting people to expand their palates.”

The key, he found, is balance. In his dozen Smartwiches he uses sweet-tart relishes and pickles and bitter greens to lift proteins that, like Portuguese cuisine, rely heavily on seafood. Guerrieri marinates his own tuna, garnishing it with avocado and watercress; house-pickled sardines (boneless, people!) are joined with pickled onions and tomatoes, cilantro and olive oil. His inner Portuguese required him to create a sandwich featuring octopus, so he cooks his own (from Portugal, of course) and mixes it, chopped, with a mélange of red and green peppers and parsley. Vegans have nothing to fear at Smartwich: The Crudo is stuffed to the gills with chopped kale, cabbage, squash, carrots, bell peppers, red beans and a mustard-herb vinaigrette. Make this rainbow simply vegetarian by adding a blanket of snow-white mozzarella. Of course, there’s also roast beef, turkey, sausage and more — including chicken that gets an assist from a suave spread of puréed … pastrami.

Every Smartwich comes on pão saloio, a Portuguese peasant bread with a dense yet tender crumb and toothsome crust. Guerrieri’s regard for bread approaches the religious. “When I was young, we ate bread with every meal,” he recalled. “And we would always leave something on the plate to be able to soak it up with a piece of bread. That last bite — in Italian, we call it ‘the scarpetta, the little shoe’ — is always the best bite. What I’m doing here is creating a whole meal around the scarpetta.”

Rincon Criollo, Huntington Station

The right bread is critical, too, for the Cuban sandwich at Rincon Criollo, the 2015 Huntington Station satellite of the venerable Queens restaurant that closed in August after 47 years. (The Acosta family is opening a new Rincon Criollo in New Hyde Park later this year.) “As long as I can remember, we have gotten our bread from a Cuban bakery in New Jersey,” said partner Rudy Acosta. “We use it for all the sandwiches — the Cubano, the pan croqueta [ham croquettes, ham and cheese], ham, chicken and steak — and we toast it with a little garlic oil for our bread baskets.”

Cuban bread looks like a French or Italian loaf, but it is flatter and contains a hint of lard, which yields a tender crumb and serves as a porcine prelude to a sandwich that contains both ham and pork. The ham can only be deli ham, the pork is slow-roasted pernil from the leg. Acosta quoted the directive of one of the restaurant’s founders, his great-uncle Baldo: “The key is to slice them thin!”

After the application of deli Swiss, yellow mustard and sliced (thin!) pickles, the sandwich is placed in a press. “It takes a few minutes,” Acosta said. “You are waiting to hear the cheese melt.” Once it has been pressed into slim submission, the sandwich emerges molten and crackling. Despite the richness of its components, though, it has a suave delicacy, and that’s only one of its contradictions. Even though it is a staple on every Cuban menu in the United States, it was invented in Tampa, Florida, where, in the late 19th century, a cigar industry arose, attracting many Cuban workers. By 1900, the workers’ cafés were serving a pressed sandwich dubbed “Cubano.”

Before his family opened their Queens restaurant, they operated Rincon Criollo in Havana, where Acosta said, “There would not have been a Cuban sandwich on the menu.” His father and uncle fled Cuba in 1962 after the Communist Revolution and, by the time they reopened in Queens in 1976, “the Cuban sandwich was already on the map here.” He was born the same year as the restaurant, and he likens the sandwich to his own Cuban heritage. “I’m as Cuban as it gets,” he declared, “even though I was born here.”

Ha Long Bay, New Hyde Park

For a true expatriate sandwich, look no further than the banh mi, brought to America by Vietnamese fleeing their war-torn country before and after the Fall of Saigon in 1975. The sandwich owes its origin to the earlier French occupation, and the banh mi (literally, “wheat bread”) starts with that most Gallic of all ingredients, the baguette. After that, the sky’s the limit. French inventions such as mayonnaise and liver pâté can mix it up with fresh herbs and pickled daikon radishes and carrots. Meat fillings range from Vietnamese sausage, ham, roast pork and ground pork to grilled chicken, sardines, shrimp, tofu and more.

One of the key American popularizers of the banh mi, Billy Dang, has been running Ha Long Bay in New Hyde Park since 2021. Soon after his family arrived in New York City, his father opened a Vietnamese restaurant on the outskirts of Brooklyn’s Chinatown. In 2004, Dang and his sister and brother-in-law, Theresa and Stanley Ng, opened Nicky’s Vietnamese Sandwiches in the East Village, which he called “the first Vietnamese sandwich place outside an Asian neighborhood.”

Dang’s “classic” banh mi features pâté, pickled vegetables, cilantro, lush crumbles of ground pork and the Vietnamese cold cut cha lua, which is similar to bologna. As with most banh mis, if you cut it in half you’ll notice that the ingredients are not evenly dispersed: The vegetables are smushed to one side, shielded from the pork by a curve of cha lua. It is impossible to get a taste of everything into one bite.

I asked Dang about this, figuring that the arrangement reflected a particular Vietnamese preference. “You know, a Japanese customer once pointed that out to me and I thought, ‘That is a very good point.’ All I can say is that it is very quick to make them this way.”

In this regard, Dang is anomalous; most craftsmen plot their sandwiches to the last detail. Despite his reverence for bread, Smartwich’s Guerrieri pinches some from the interior to provide a more capacious home for his fillings; Acosta’s ham and cheese are cut so they don’t overhang their Cuban rolls.

Brendan Banks cuts off one end of his hero rolls before he slices them open because “they open better that way.” A fearless interrogation of his process also led him to question one of his most basic assumptions. “I’ve been against lettuce and tomato on the bottom of a sandwich my whole life,” he declared. “But when I moved them to the bottom, I had to admit, it’s tastier and prettier.” Give Banks another few months and his sandwiches will be tastier and prettier still. This is the relentless pursuit of sandwich perfection.

The print edition version of this story included Roto Grocery in Bay Shore, which has closed.