'Monster Truck' Ham Sandwich At LIC Bakery Lands Glowing Review

LONG ISLAND CITY, QUEENS — There are lots of places in New York City where you can get a ham sandwich, but only one bakery in Long Island City makes an iteration of the lunchbox classic akin to an "edible, elegant monster truck."

Ghaya, famed pastry chef Ghaya Oliveira's eponymous cafe-slash-bakery in Long Island City's Jacx & Co food hall, serves up the sandwich in question, which Eater New York's chief critic Ryan Sutton recently recommended in his column "Buy, Sell, Hold."

The ham and cheese sandwich includes 11 layers of alternating cured and sliced pork and emmentaler cheese, placed between buttered layers of toasted croissant.

"Oliveira’s sandwich doesn’t so much recall an actual ham sandwich as a Wes Andersonian fantasy of one, meant to be consumed by a mustachioed 19th century robber baron with a purple suit, a monogrammed ascot, and a checkered past," Sutton writes, adding that the sandwich's imaginary eater might dig into the multi-layered dish with heirloom flatware.

Oliveira told Sutton she credits the sandwich's layering scheme to her favorite dessert: a mille-feuille, comprised of vanilla custard sandwiched between layers of flaky puff pastry.

Sutton initially assumed that the meat and dairy-rich sandwich would be "unbalanced" — it is served with a small side salad but has no other trace of vegetables — but after digging into the stack of ham and cheese he finds that the simplicity "works."

"Oliveira uses a low-salt jambon de Paris that doesn’t overwhelm the palate; it’s gently sweet and thickly cut. The cheese, in turn, provides a touch of neutral ooziness while the warm laminated dough adds requisite levels of Napoleon-style crunch and toasty brown butter aromas," he writes, adding that the sandwich might benefit from some arugula or pickled chillies but is still "close to perfect."

Sutton wholeheartedly recommends buying the $13.25 sandwich, but says there are other worthwhile things on the menu too, like a Tunisian stew and a "very good" chocolate croissant stuffed with a layer of homemade Nutella.

Read Sutton's full review, titled "This Ham-and-Cheese Mille-Feuille Is a Sandwich for the Stratosphere," here.