Off-Site Kitchen's Brisket Sandwich Is a Gold Medal Sandwich

Gavin Cleaver

A surprising number of business people have business lunches at Off-Site Kitchen. You might think, being business people, in suits and ties, discussing contracts (all business people ever discuss is contracts) and tapping away on their Blackberries like it's 2004 might shy away from a place as earthy as Off-Site. Yet, here they are, on a Monday afternoon, sitting out in the sunshine five yards from a table football table and three yards from a large trash receptacle.

Why would they choose a place that serves ginormous sandwiches for not much money over a place that serves them a $50 steak that can be accompanied with strong alcohol?

Here's why. Off-Site Kitchen is delicious.

So delicious, in fact, that the deliciousness transcends all class boundaries, as a line of definitively mismatched people who might never see each other at all under normal circumstances winds out the door every day. It's like a brief insight into those parts of Rich Dallas that you know exist but you can never afford to confirm exist. Whip out your Blackberry and you might find yourself working for a law firm by the end of lunch.

I don't even care how the brisket in Off-Site Kitchen's 48 Hour Pepper Brisket sandwich is made. It could be smoked for two days, although that seems excessive. It could be left outside to fend for itself for two days, with only the strongest brisket surviving and making it into a sandwich. Forty-eight hours could be a reference to how long the wait seems between ordering and receiving said sandwich. I just don't care. I need this sandwich.

Placed under an apology of lettuce and diced tomato that doesn't even constitute 0.2 of your 5-a-day, the pepper brisket needs pepper in the title because it is so very pepper that, if you were for some reason allergic to pepper and had managed to survive this long, this sandwich would be the thing that did for you.

The brisket is layered deep inside the sub roll, is super-moist, cut into chunks just small enough to bite properly but just big enough to fall out of the sandwich when you try and bite another part, and dotted with decadent lumps of fat. It's not particularly smoky, or if it is the smoke is overpowered by the pepper, but it doesn't matter. It's the sandwich of dreams. It even has cheese. Lots of melted cheese.

Now cheese is not something I'm usually exposed to in relation to barbecue -- and thank God for that, or I would undoubtedly be dead by now -- but in this sandwich format, paired with brisket that is less smoked and more just moist delightful meat, it is perfect. You hear me? Perfect.

If there were some sort of sandwich Olympics, OSK's pepper brisket sandwich would carry home the gold, silver, and bronze, with the rest of the competitors left trailing far behind. If this were a sandwich world cup, the pepper brisket would be both Argentina and Brazil.

I'm going again. You can't stop me.