IS there any pain quite as sweet as the one caused by a steaming drip of cheese oozing from between slices of just-grilled bread and onto your lower lip?
Buttery, salty and enduringly simple, the grilled cheese sandwich stands unrivaled in the universe of simple gastro-pleasures. It is the gateway sandwich to the land of hot sustenance, the first stovetop food many children learn to prepare by themselves.
But in Los Angeles, the grilled cheese is less a starting place than a destination, an object of outright mania, not just at workaday coffee shops but also at any number of well-regarded restaurants, where it’s slathered with short ribs, decorated with piquillo peppers or topped gently with a quail egg.
Thursday is grilled cheese night at Campanile, a standard-bearer of Italian dining in Los Angeles, and the restaurant’s busiest night, when the tables bustle with families, hot daters, girls-night-out revelers downing prosecco, and divorced dads hoping to buy good will from their estranged children.
The Melt Down, a restaurant in Culver City devoted to the gooey sandwich, has lines out the door at lunch. Every April is grilled cheese month at Clementine, a lunch spot near Century City, with an elaborate new theme each time.
For the past four years, this city has also been home to the Grilled Cheese Invitational. Roughly 600 people show up at an unpublicized address, armed with frying pans and camping stoves, and are given 20 minutes to demonstrate their grilled cheese prowess. (One year, a contestant constructed an eight-foot grilled sandwich rendition of “The Gates” by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.)
Whether created with fresh-baked sourdough and enhanced with tangy green garlic, or slapped together with Wonder Bread and Kraft Singles, the grilled cheese sandwich is nothing less than consolatory after you’ve spent a long day sitting in traffic on the 405 freeway.
Buck Down, one of the organizers of the Grilled Cheese Invitational, sees its appeal this way: “It may very well be the ultimate comfort food, and one thing Los Angeles is about is insecurity. If you have to live here for your job, your entire career is predicated on insecurity, because you’re either going to be replaced, fired or exposed as a fraud. What better way to get comfort than grilled cheese?”
Of course, Los Angeles is more than the entertainment industry, and the grilled cheese sandwich appeals well beyond its corridors, as three months of happy trekking through diners from Hollywood to Culver City showed.
The classic Los Angeles grilled cheese, like the $5.95 version served at the 101 Coffee Shop in Hollywood, begins with perfectly buttered sourdough bread, topped with cheddar and perhaps a nice tomato, grilled to tawny perfection, its contents stretching appropriately with each bite. It is perfectly paired with a Coke (not diet, thanks).
But high-end grilled cheese owes a debt to Nancy Silverton, who began grilled cheese night a decade ago when she was working behind the bar at Campanile, which she formerly owned. She wanted something to increase business on a slow night. “But more importantly, I love grilled cheese sandwiches,” said Ms. Silverton, who now runs Pizzeria Mozza and Osteria Mozza here.
“That goes back to the junior high school cafeteria in Tarzana, where I was addicted to the super-greasy ones. I have upgraded my cheese preference, but that is where my love of grilled cheese went back to.”
It wasn’t long before grilled cheese night became the hottest day of the week at Campanile, and it remains so, says its current chef and owner, Mark Peel, Ms. Silverton’s ex-husband.
On a recent Thursday night, my 4-year-old and her friend worked through a classic, a Gruyère (no mustard) perfectly pressed, while the two adults shared a version with chickpeas and tomatoes, more salad than grilled cheese, really, and a Gorgonzola number with spiced walnuts and honey (not for beginners).
Many other chefs have their own exalted version of the sandwich. At the Foundry on Melrose, Eric Greenspan has a grilled cheese that weds taleggio cheese with short ribs, arugula and apricot caper purée on raisin bread.
Mr. Greenspan served raisin bread with his cheese courses and thought it would translate well in grilled cheese sandwiches. He added the meat because, he explained, a chef with ribs on the menu tends to have short rib scraps lying around anyway. (I have provided a recipe that does not call for ribs, presuming that like me, you have a lack of short rib scraps in your kitchen.)
I ate one in near silence in his kitchen over a white linen napkin, unable to turn my attention from this slightly spicy (arugula), decidedly messy (cheese and short ribs) and pleasantly salty amalgam.
“Grilled cheese is basically fat on fat on fat,” Mr. Greenspan said cheerfully.
Just because a 9-year-old with mildly permissive parents can find grilled cheese nirvana on her first time at the stove, that does not mean there are no secrets to the perfect sandwich.
Chefs agree: butter, room temperature and lots of it, must be spread all the way to the crust, to prevent the bread from taking on a soggy center with dried edges. This is not toast!
Further, the sandwich must be minded so that it does not scorch, a common transgression. “Bread quality matters,” Mr. Greenspan said, “but butter quality matters more.”
Quinn Hatfield, the chef at Hatfield’s, prepares most of his restaurant’s signature croque-madame, made with raw hamachi and prosciutto on toasted brioche with beurre blanc and topped with a quail egg.
“I end up throwing away 30 percent of the sandwiches that other people make,” he said. “It’s really a tricky maneuver because you’ve got to fry the bread in a lot of butter but not let it get too hard.”
Plenty of home cooks have taken grilled cheese to a superlative form, as well. The grilled cheese invitational here started as something of a joke among friends, said Mr. Down, an organizer. By year three, he said, the event had become so competitive, the organizers had to stop publicizing it. And yet, it grew.
Grilled cheese artisans compete in three categories: missionary (bread, butter and cheese), kama sutra (sandwiches with meats or other ingredients and fancier bread) and honey pot (dessert sandwiches). On 50 feet of tables, contestants fry the sandwiches and then divide them into quarters. They are placed on paper plates with ballots stapled to them, which runners bring to the judging table.
Sandwiches are graded on presentation, taste, Wessonality (“What makes this sandwich special,” Mr. Down explained) and style. One recent winner featured polenta fried two times with Brie, prosciutto and pesto.
But really, let’s not get too carried away. I prefer to belly up to the counter at the 101 for a basic grilled cheese, pondering as I eat the whereabouts of my high school friend Joe Puleo, who whipped me up government-issue cheddar versions after my cocktail waitress shift at Cheek to Cheek in Kalamazoo, Mich. Because really, for any native-born American, the first thing grilled cheese tastes of is home. In that lies its true appeal.
Tags:Glamour,Sandwich,cheese ,Gorgonzola