Well, Mark Coates isn’t going to actually feed it to you, but you get the idea. Bebe’s Barbecue is now offering delivery from Wednesday through Saturday, 12 to 9pm. That’s a pretty substantial offer right there, one of our favorite sandwiches in the city landing right on your doorstep. Don’t forget to try the mac and cheese, banana pudding, and collard greens as well.

Michael Klein has a map of the delivery area currently being served.

Bebe’s Barbecue
1017 S. 9th Street – Philadelphia, PA 19147 (Google Map)

When your family’s been selling roast pork sandwiches for four generations, and you’ve got a successful shop with a great location, it can be hard to make any changes.  DiNic’s roast pork sandwich is a best-seller and winner of dozens of awards and “best of” mentions.  The formula works.  But Joe Nicolosi knows that the business thrives by improving what you do; learning, and making adjustments.  And no change speaks louder than the upgraded version of the classic: DiNic’s Italian pulled pork sandwich.

A braised cousin of the roast pork, the pulled pork is marinated for a day with spices and fresh aromatics, then browned and slow cooked till the meat falls off the bone, simmered in the same natural stock as the roast pork, plus some wine and tomato sauce.  The result is a rich flavor and flaky wet texture that saturates the bread but never gets soggy.

Joe takes pride in continuing a tradition that began when his great-grandfather roasted the pork from his South Philadelphia butcher shop at the holidays, and has continued on through the years through various incarnations of DiNic’s.  (DiNic = DiClaudio + Nicolosi, the original sandwich shop partners at 10th & Oregon.)  The roast pork and roast beef recipes are generations old, but still, Joe constantly tweaks the balance between moister meat and a richer stock.

Working alongside his father Tommy since he was five years old, Joe makes the roast pork sandwiches with a focus on good basics: a PA farm fresh ham roasted to medium with garlic, onion, rosemary and oher seasoning, making a flavorful jus in the roasting pan.  Cooled and sliced thin, the roast pork is served with provolone and hot peppers, provolone and spinach, or provolone and broccoli rabe with a garlicky kick.

DiNic’s is about real cooking, where everything is from scratch, anti-commerical, in step with what Joe sees as a slow foods trend.  Much of the produce and meats come from just steps down the market at Iovine’s and from Martin’s butcher shop.  Another local vendor provides farm fresh prime hanging beef.  His bread, from longtime friend Danny DiGiampietro’s South Philadelphia bakery, is closer to what bread was like 50 years ago — crusty and crisp, not the pillowy soft hoagie rolls more commonly used today.  Joe believes it is important to educate yourself; stay fresh; and with a nod to the past, continue to push forward.

In his off-hours, Joe enjoys a good burger at places like Sketch Burger, Good Dog, and Monk’s.  He also goes for the shortrib bocadillos at Tinto.

With a strong base of local regulars, and a surge with every convention, DiNic’s is poised to continue their legacy of producing one of Philadelphia’s most loved sandwiches, and also to start a new chapter, where new sandwiches express the passion and the commitment to learning, innovating and improving what you do.

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DiNic’s
Reading Terminal Market
12th St & Arch St, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19107 (Google Map)

Tim Crowe may be a web developer by trade, but his love for cooking has lead him to launch Eating Crowe a fun, and casual online cooking show. With help from his co-host Josh Nittle, Crowe invades his friends’ kitchen in Fishtown and shoots two episodes a month with the help of several others. As the show is only six episodes in, with recipes like lobster ravioli and chorizo empanadas, it is evident that the production is getting better every time. We are big fans of the ambitious overhead shots. Says Crowe about the show:

“Eating Crowe cracks wise at foodie culture and food television. We’re trying to show that it’s fun and every dish doesn’t have to come out perfectly. We try things we’ve never done before and have a lot of fun doing it. Sometimes dishes succeed, sometimes they fail, either way its okay because you’re always a phone call away from a pizza. What’s more important is that you cook, eat and share food”

The latest episode of Eating Crowe steps us through a deliciously delectable pulled pork sandwich topped with a sweet, but tangy Cherry Coke based sauce and crunchy coleslaw. These pictures and video have us drooling, and Crowe’s casual cooking style has us feeling confident that we could pull these sandwiches off with ease. Hit the jump for the video and a link to the full recipe.

Cherry Coke Pulled Pork Sandwich Recipe [Eating Crowe]

Southern BBQ, outside of Savannah
Despite the talk about urban multiculturalism, the most complex culinary unions in this country were in the rural south, where Afro-Caribbean slaves and European landowners entwined their open-fire cooking techniques and native ingredients into “plantation”-style cooking.  There is probably no better example of this hybrid than the all-day affair of barbecue, arguably America’s most distinctively regional food.

There are about a zillion places to get barbecue in the south and probably just as many opinions about where and why. I relied on the advice of Steven Raichlen (grilling expert and author of many books, including BBQ USA which features a 500 year national timeline and was also a great help to me about Memphis barbecue for another Travel + Leisure story) who told me that as cultish as barbecue has become, it was also the country’s most democratic form of cooking: slaves may have cooked it, but landowners staged it, and if you look at history you will see great pit masters from diverse backgrounds.

(NOTE: It has been several years since I was here.)
At the Pink Pig (also Raichlen’s suggestion), barbecue continues its everyman reputation except this time every “man” is Rita Thomas, the coifed and cultured pit master. A former nurse who inherited the restaurant from her brother, Thomas believes in running a family business—Mom behind the register, son over the cutting board: “My Daddy always had a smoke going.”

Out back, she opened the door of the pit, letting me get a whiff of spice-rubbed Boston Butt roasts (actually the upper portion of the pork whole shoulder), smoking over a combination of oak and hickory. The result was a sandwich of hand-chopped meat with silky interior and crispy edges on a delicate, almost sweet dinner roll, accompanied by a trio of sauces:  Original Honey Mustard, Low Country Fire, and a spicy vinegar and mustard combination, Gullah Spice (rooted in the distinctive community of heritage rich and reclusive West African-Americans who live on the semi-tropical sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia).

Later that night, when I pulled my tee shirt over my head, I smelled that smoke pit all over again. Not in that reeking “morning after” way. But a fragrant mist with the power to conjure up memories, like a fine perfume.

Cubano, Miami
With a similar back story to other port sandwiches, the Cubano was reportedly designed to feed workers—in this case, Cuban cigar factory workers transported to southern Florida (particularly in Key West and Tampa) in the late 1800’s. However, it was the late 1980’s before I had my first Cubano, just about the time Chef Norman Van Aiken was shaking things up with something he called “New World Cuisine” (although it seems commonplace now, there was an exciting newness to his combination of local Latin and Caribbean flavors with traditional European techniques) and drawing young chefs from all over the country. The hours were long, the nights late, and the sandwich, the Cubano.

Miami is a nocturnal city—especially in the stretch known as “Little Havana,” where the Cubano is a vital part of the late night landscape.  In the same fashion as other iconic regional sandwiches, a Cubano starts with the bread: an 8-inch roll typically made with lard, which accounts for its lightness. (Many places make a smaller version on sweeter bread called media noche or “midnight” sandwich.) There’s typically a slathering of butter under the sugar-cured Bolo ham and Swiss cheese. But the real flavor is delivered by slow-roasted marinated pork (lechon asado), always cut by hand. That tiny dagger of tanginess needed to pierce the richness of the fillings is supplied by thinly-sliced pickle and its juices. After spending time in a plancha (or press) to toast the bread and warm the ingredients in their own steam (flattening the sandwich by about 1/3), the Cubano is cut the diagonal to deliver the most possible melted cheese in ratio to the bread.

The next two locations don’t qualify as “ports.” But I include them in my map trace because each represents a “soft” boundary, where cultures drift into each other and instinctively intertwine. And although hamburgers and tacos aren’t technically considered to be “sandwiches,” each falls in line with the notion that multiculturism finds its natural home within some sort of bread.

Green Chile Cheeseburger, New Mexico
Although they are practically non-existent in the rest of the country, you can get a green chile cheeseburger just about anywhere in New Mexico. Now a green chile cheeseburger is not some gimmick, like when a French chef stuffs a burger with foie gras and viola, a hundred dollar lunch. Ever since Sixteenth Century Spanish Conquistadors led settlers along the El Camino Real (the first European road in North America, stretching from Mexico City to Santa Fe), this land has been part of the Mexican frontier, and on it they grow more green chiles (the state’s top cash crop) than anywhere else in the country. The standard bearer is the fleshy Hatch green chile, available fresh in season or fire roasted, peeled and fresh-frozen in their own juices.

As to the actual burger, without becoming all Proustian about it, here’s how I got mine. I was sitting in the Tasty Freeze in Tularosa, New Mexico, eating fried green chiles out of a white paper bag, when the woman behind the counter—who introduced herself as Debbie—said since I liked them so much, maybe I should try her sister Linda’s green chile cheeseburger. Two hours later, I was sitting at the counter of the Airport Grill in the Alamogordo Airport (located near the Air Tanker Base of the Lincoln Zone Dispatch Center for wildfire control) doing just that: enjoying Linda’s tender, oversized burger topped with a few spoonfuls of diced fire-roasted green chiles secured by a dome of smoothly melted white American cheese, set upon on a 5-inch diameter bun.

Fish Taco, San Diego
The fish taco is a link to the lobster roll (Maine) and fried clam sandwich (Connecticut), probably created when some hungry guy wrapped the catch-of- the-day in bread as a way to produce a heartier meal. It’s nearly impossible to pinpoint the exact day any regional sandwich makes its first appearance. But Ralph Rubio (founder of Rubio’s Fresh Mexican Grill) has a fairly good idea about the modern fish taco, tracing the convergence of cultures—Californian, Mexican and surf—in his own life to 1973.

Rubio was on one of his annual San Diego State University Spring Break surfing trips to the Baja Peninsula. He remembers the beach-shack fish tacos he got there for 50 cents as “crave-able,” a feeling he says he didn’t get from other foods. In 1983, Rubio opened his first walk-up stand in a converted Orange Julius on Mission Drive in San Diego and caught the wave. When I spoke with him for the Travel + Leisure story in 2004, he was twenty-one years into his venture, with 150 regional stores and over 50 million fish tacos sold. Here’s how Rubio built his business from the ground up.

- six-inch corn tortilla (heated on the grill)
- beer-batter fried fish (Rubio’s uses Alaskan Pollock—a mild white fish—and gets an extra crispy crust)
- crema blanca (light mayonnaise with a touch of yogurt for smoothness and tang)
- blended salsa (basically the same ingredients as salsa fresca, but smooth—not chopped)
- shredded cabbage (provides the crunch and won’t wilt like lettuce)
- squeeze of fresh lime juice

Banh Mi, San Francisco
Working up the coast to Saigon Sandwiches in San Francisco, you’ll find the banh mi, an interesting example of a double immigration sandwich.

The baguette-style roll (lightened with rice flour) emerged during the French colonization of Vietnam. But the Vietnamese who migrated to the United States following the Saigon evacuation in 1975 brought the sandwich to us. Banh mi means bread (you must specify the filling) and those who short hand this relatively new sandwich as a “South East Asian hoagie” undervalue the distinctive flavorings, like sweet red pork barbecued pork sprinkled with slivers of lightly pickled cucumber and carrot seasoned with jalapenos and cilantro.

The increasing popularity of banh mi parallels Vietnamese immigration: Hawaii, the West Coast, and eventually working its way across the country to gain a foothold in the East. But the sandwich is still far from main stream. The best banh mi remain in their own ethnic neighborhoods, usually in small storefronts. Years ago, I got my first taste at Saigon Sandwiches where two surprises awaited. The good one: (at the time) the bahn mi was less than three bucks. The other: The counter women took orders from every person in line and made all the sandwiches at one time.

Italian Beef and the Borinquen Restaurant, both in Chicago
Moving east to Chicago, you come across another sandwich which is distantly related to Philadelphia’s hoagie (and thus, the Muffaletta): the Italian Beef. Unlike the hoagie’s layering of cured pork meats and cheese, the Italian Beef is the bountiful product of the city’s Union Stockyards—beef so thinly sliced it resembles a meat mille feuilles—topped by another sort of “salad,” called Giardinera. I got mine from Al’s # 1 Italian Beef at its landmark Taylor Street location.

The lineage of the Italian beef sandwich is impeccable.  Anthony Ferreri, a turn-of-the-century sandwich peddler who sold his wares from vendor trays (like those used in baseball stadiums) and also catered “peanut weddings” (for Italian immigrants who couldn’t afford more) begat Al and Frances Ferreri who opened a small curbside Beef stand in 1938 (with Frances’ husband Chris Pacelli) that eventually moved to Taylor Street and became Al’s # 1 Italian Beef, (at the time I went) still run by Frances’ sons—the Pacaelli brothers.

So are the ingredients.

- Top sirloin butt: oven roasted in water with garlic and “secret” seasonings to make the flavorful “juice” in which the sandwiches are dipped.
- Giardinera: a fermented vegetable relish made with hot peppers and celery so finely shaved that the mixture simply melts away when it hits the hot beef, soaking its flavor all the way through the sandwich
- Gonnella Bread: baked under the direction of the same family since 1886; crisp-crusted and substantial enough to stand up to dipping

There are no seats at Al’s—but then you can’t really eat this sandwich sitting down. Instead, unwrap your sandwich and spread the paper out on the counter in front of you. Lean the top half of your body forward (over the counter) while tilting the bottom half away (as though you are hugging someone and want your shoulders but not your hips to touch) so the juices drip down onto the paper (missing your clothes and shoes). When you’re done, wrap the paper up and throw your mess away.

Jibarito
Just when I thought I had picked the city of Chicago clean, a chef named Randy Zweiben took me to eat a sandwich I had never seen before or since.

According to the 2000 Census, Chicago is now one of the top three centers of Puerto Rican population in this country, and as immigration patterns changed, the city sprouted a new sandwich—the Jibarito (hee-bah-REE-toh)—found in the tightly knit Puerto Rican community of Humboldt Park.

Drive along Paseo Boricua, a mile long stretch of the Division Street corridor anchored by 59 foot, 40 ton steel sculptures of the Puerto Rican flag, and you’ll pass several places advertising “La Casa Del Jibarito.” But it is Borinquen Restaurant owner Juan C. Figueroa (known as Peter) who can take credit for the success of the sandwich and vice versa, since he chalks up his recent expansion to spiraling Jibarito sales. Zweiben, who worked in Miami during that Nuevo Latino wave and knows his way around a Cubano, explained exactly how this sandwich was made.

The innovative “bread” is made from twice fried green plantains (sliced and pressed into a rough rectangular shape and brushed with garlic and oil) while the fillings rely on traditional cooking methods. (For example, the pork is slow cooked, similar to Cuban style; the chicken is fried, then pulled from the bones and chopped, skin and all.)

The Jibarito is an unusual reversal of the typical sandwich texture: creamy (via the “plantain” bread) on the outside and chewy on the inside. It is also an odd blend of old and new—the Latin heritage diluted by a layering of pedestrian American sandwich ingredients (iceberg lettuce, unripe tomatoes, American cheese, mayonnaise). Judging from the crowded tables, the sandwich is extremely popular; it is also extremely regionalized. But maybe not for long—because that’s how immigrant culture spreads in this country, sandwich by sandwich.

Barbecue is popping up all over Philadelphia these days. From the recent opening of Q BBQ & Tequila to the popularity of pulled pork sandwiches on gastropub menus (think Slate, Pub & Kitchen, etc.), the heat is on for competitors in this category. The newly opened Bebe’s Barbecue on 9th Street in the Italian Market is the newest foray into smoked meat. We unbreaded their signature item, a Carolina-style pulled pork sandwich, and found that is has the right stuff to smoke out the competition.

Bebe’s pulled pork sandwich starts with a cut of pork shoulder coated thickly in homemade dry rub. It is then smoked for twelve hours, when it emerges tender and with a pronounced and flavorful “bark,” or crust created from the rub. To construct the sandwich, the pork is pulled apart by hand, tossed with homemade Lexington-style barbecue sauce (a tangy red sauce with a deep and complex flavor), and served on a toasted roll. “Don’t waste good bread on barbecue,” proprietor and chef Mark Coates says. “The bread should melt away… it’s about the meat.”

Coates, an affable and charismatic character with a Southern drawl, was born in Charlotte, NC but raised on a chicken hatchery in Mississippi. On the hatchery, he got started on barbecue with his family’s chicken recipe (whole chickens mopped with vinegar, butter, and lemon over an open flame). Coates’ grandmother Bebe, the namesake of the restaurant, taught him how to cook early on and he still calls her for recipes. But it wasn’t until 1998 that Coates learned the nuances of Carolina-style barbecue from an uncle in Greensboro.

When Coates moved to Philadelphia in 2005, he settled in Bella Vista and perfected his pork and other goodies on a home smoker. After tossing around the idea of opening a restaurant with friend (and now business partner) Tamara Van Winkle for a couple of years, Coates finally pulled the trigger in April and moved into his Italian Market location.

Why a barbecue joint in the Italian Market? Coates was reading an article in The Inquirer about girlfriend Heather Bryson’s sculpture installation at The Inquirer’s offices on North Broad (she also owns B-Squared gallery up the street from the market). In the same edition of the paper, he stumbled upon Rich Nichols’ article about the revitalization of the Italian Market. “It clicked,” Coates says, adding that “the Market has a reputation for thriving during tough economic times.”

Besides the pulled pork, which is also served as a platter with two sides and cornbread), Bebe’s serves a rotating selection of dry-rubbed, smoked ribs (“try them without the sauce first”), brisket, and whole rotisserie chickens. Look for the brisket and chicken as sandwiches when available. Sides, which are all vegetarian, are made in-house and include collard greens, macaroni and cheese, sweet potatoes and Dixie-cut cole slaw. Coates sources everything he can from the Italian Market itself, and stresses that his kitchen lacks a freezer, microwave and can opener–which means that everything he serves is fresh.

Despite his commitment to authentic Southern barbecue traditions when crafting the pulled pork, Coates is eager to incorporate the flavors of today’s Italian Market into his cooking.  On Sunday mornings, he makes a nod towards the market’s heritage by serving prosciutto and provolone sandwiches on homemade biscuits.  Noting the explosion of taquerias and Mexican grocery stores in the area, he is experimenting with pulled pork tamales.  He even imagines someday serving smoked tofu sandwiches for the vegetarian crowd.

Bebe’s will be a fine addition to the booming food scene on 9th Street. As Coates puts it, “If you want a hoagie, go to Sarcone’s. If you want roast pork, go to George’s. For some real barbecue, come to Bebe’s.”

Bebe’s Barbecue
1017 S 9th Street Philadelphia, PA, 19147 (Google Map)

Having discovered that the Old City crowd prefers a late night binge of tacos, ribs and burritos over seafood, Philadelphia Fish & Company took just one week to transform from a 26-year-old neighborhood fixture into a Southern influenced BBQ restaurant. Reborn as Q, it’s a place where the friendly staff and comfortable, bluesy atmosphere reflects the traditional family food served hot off the smoker and full of heart.

Pit master Tom Stewart learned his craft from his grandfather in eastern North Carolina, where real BBQ is a smoked pork butt (shoulder) in a vinegar-based sauce.  And as you travel west to Tennessee and into Missouri, the sauce tends to get sweeter, thicker, and richer with a stronger influence of tomato.  Q offers a selection of three Dixie sauces: Vinegar, a thin sauce made from “spices and love with just a hint of tomato” (though true NC purists may cringe at the thought); Q Sauce, a tomato-based balance of sweet, spice and vinegar; and Sweet, a thick Kansas City-style sauce that lives up to its name.  Perhaps most remarkable is that each of the sauces works well with the others, giving you the ability to customize the flavor to your own preference.

Chicken, pork and beef are each rubbed with their own closely guarded secret spice blends and smoked up to 13 hours at a shot with chunks of fragrant hickory.  Flame-kissed on the grill to finish and pulled by hand (or sliced thin, in the case of the brisket) the meats take on a depth of flavor that can only come with slow cooking.

The pulled pork sandwich is the top selling item on the menu.  A mound of the smokey, tangy meat is topped with cool, refreshing cole slaw, served in non-traditional shreds of cabbage, as opposed to the finely chopped bits you’d find in the Outer Banks. We were impressed by the texture and consistency of the meat, tender and pulled in thicker pieces than we’re accustomed to. The North Carolina vinegar adds just the right amount of sweet and sour playing off the meat nicely.

The brisket sandwich is spicy and smoky, tender to the bite and full of big flavor, though slightly drier than we’d prefer after hours on the smoker.  But the sauces (a mix of Q and Vinegar) saved the day, adding a juicy burst and extra spiciness that perfectly complimented the meat.  Served on a firm but fresh roll, the sandwich held together well and managed the generous serving of meat.

Though it is not a sandwich, we recommend trying one of their 60 tequilas in a flute glass, which mitigates the pungent sharpness and offers a silky, mellow, classy way to do body shots off a drunk chick.

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Q BBQ & Tequila
207 Chestnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19106 (Google Map)

Phoebe’s Bar-B-Q is a hole-in-the-wall takeout joint on South Street in Fitler Square, full of big flavors and an unabashedly gruff staff befitting the tagline “Ribs With Attitude”.  Known primarily for their ribs and rotisserie chicken, they also offer most of the menu items in sandwich form.  The brisket sandwich is a definite winner, but the pulled pork disappoints and the rib “sandwiches” are total failures.  Not the ribs themselves are bad — in fact, they are quite delicious — but the audacity to call a platter of hulking bone-in ribs on sauce-soaked white bread “sandwiches” is misleading at best and deceitful at worst.

Nonetheless, the brisket is a real treat.  A smokey, saucy stack of tender, flavorful meat on a dense New York Bakery kaiser roll, the sandwich holds together in the hand, and flakes apart in the mouth.  The roll becomes increasingly more saturated with sauce with each bite but avoids becoming too soft or mushy, maintaining a moist and chewy consistency till the end.

The pulled pork sandwich misses on three levels: the meat is less-than-juicy (not quite dry, but not quite succulent); it is served in large pieces, not shreds; and it is surprisingly mild in flavor, falling well short of expectations.

Sandwiches are served with an adorable (but too small) side of crunchy cole slaw and your choice of Phoebe’s famous hot or mild sauce.  And though there is no rotisserie chicken sandwich on the menu, we frequently build our own chicken sandwich with the bits we pull from the platter.

Phoebe’s Bar-B-Q
2214 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 19146 (Google Map)