Few phrases within the English language have the onomatopoeic satisfaction of “slop.” Its opening consonants evoke sludge and slipperiness, the spherical “O” and smacking “P” the liquid wallop of a viscous substance hitting a floor at pace. Pigs eat slop. Clogged sinks overflow with it. A.I. engines generate it. It’s not a time period of allure or refinement, but at Farley’s, a brand new counter-service restaurant in Mattress-Stuy specializing in sloppy-joe sandwiches, it takes on a mantle of respect, even reverence. “Would you like the slop on the sandwich?” you may be requested, on ordering lunch to go. The choice is to have the slop portioned out right into a takeout soup container, and the sandwich bun packaged individually—once you’re prepared to sit down down and eat, you are able to do the slopping your self. In the event you waffle in your order—torn, say, between a conventional sandwich and the menu’s a number of progressive ones—you may be praised for lastly making your choose with a phrase probably by no means uttered earlier than the opening of this restaurant: “That’s a great slop.”
The sloppy joe is an unsung icon of Americana cooking, a number of rungs down the ladder of respectability from its extra celebrated quick-serve cousins, such because the hamburger and the chili canine. The sandwich, that includes floor meat—typically beef—suspended in a thick, candy tomatoey sauce, has grow to be an avatar of the horrible college lunch, a cliché that tends to go together with hairnets, greasy aprons, and different parts of canteen grotesquerie. “I understand how yous youngsters like ’em sloppy!” a wild-eyed lunch woman in “Billy Madison,” Adam Sandler’s 1995 satire of the idiocy of decrease training, cries. That is, in fact, a tremendously unfair characterization of the lunch woman, who, given her career of feeding hungry kids, must be stereotyped as saintly relatively than monstrous. It’s additionally unfair to the sloppy joe, which even in its most slapdash kind is a genuinely scrumptious development. My very own school-cafeteria reminiscences are principally of cartilaginous hen sandwiches, microwaved to tepid inside their individually sealed plastic wrappers. A sloppy joe, slopped to order, even perfunctorily, would’ve been a fantastical deal with.
The sandwich’s status has been rehabilitated of late, in matches and begins. There’s a stable, mega-meaty take on the mini-chain Schnipper’s; a terrific vegan model that was on the menu at Superiority Burger may have transformed even probably the most skeptical snob or carnivore. However Farley’s, with an all-slop menu and retro stylings, makes probably the most impassioned argument but for the sloppy joe’s reconsideration. There are seven sorts of slop (developed by the restaurant’s co-owners, Samuel Saverance and Matt Buentello, in session with the chef Fred Hua), all of them constructed atop the foundational “mom” sauce of the standard sloppy joe. The Authentic Joe—sauce, meat; basic—is a bit of tangy, the combination tinted by Worcestershire and noticeably celery-forward. It’s good, however not essentially the sloppy joe of my desires. Issues get extra thrilling once you pattern the variations. The Cubano Joe incorporates cubed ham blended in with the slop, together with pickles, Swiss cheese, and yellow mustard. The Cajun Joe adorns a regular slop with shrimp and chopped andouille sausage, creating one thing like an étouffée on a roll. The Mekong Joe—my favourite by a mile, and one of the crucial thrilling sandwiches I’ve had this 12 months—is an excellent mishmash of Southeast Asian parts, together with fragrant fish sauce, spicy chicken’s-eye chiles, brilliant Thai pink curry, and a voluptuous backdrop of coconut; crabmeat blended into the slop lends an additional funky be aware.
