Thursday, October 20, 2011

These sandwiches will mess you up (in the best possible way)

I'm sure that your first reaction on going to Cleveland is something along the lines of a very enthusiastic, wholehearted "Meh." Well, seriously... dare I say I love Cleveland, after today. Here is something that will absolutely blow your mind.


Here. This. Go here. Please just go here.

Melt Bar & Grilled has had some awesome media coverage, including Man vs. Food, NBC, USA Today, and so on and so on. I heard about it through my friend who is an executive chef at a fancy food establishment back in Seattle, and he gave me the "you just have to try it" speech. The concept is .. basically, gigantic gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches. They've gained some notoriety for having a "tattoo club": anyone who gets a Melt tattoo gets a 25% discount off of their sandwiches/meals for life. There are over 200 people who have done this.

They have three separate locations in Lakewood, Cleveland Heights, and Independence. I went to the Lakewood restaurant, and it was really hip and pretty big -- there's a full service bar with great local beers, the waiters are super friendly, and there are a ton of both meaty/cheesy and vegetarian/vegan options. Their special sandwich for the month was a "meatloaf melt," and I went ahead and had the vegan version of that.


Seriously. Go here.

No joke, this sandwich will feed you for a week. A family of four. A pack of hungry, vicious, vegan tigers. A horde of relentless cheese and meat hungry gorillas. It was several thousand kinds of delicious. The bread was phenomenally crispy and fluffy, the meatloaf was pretty dense, and the sandwich itself was packed full of mashed potatoes. Mashed potatoes. In a sandwich. What is this, Christmas??

Their menu is huge, their beers are great, the portion sizes will put you in your place and the sandwiches are, for lack of a better word, one-of-the-best-things-I've-ever-eaten-oh-my-goodness. It will make you happy to be in Cleveland and itching to come back.

website yelp

1 comment: