Sad sandwiches

The only thing I ever really enjoyed about shopping mall food courts was watching the Hot Dog On a Stick workers throttle and pump that giant, wondrous lemonade machine in their silly hats. And maybe all that silliness was worth it since the lemonade was always the best. But Saturday’s journey into a similar food court in Emeryville lacked anything worthwhile, even the silly Hot Dog hats.

The so-called “Food Market” in that strip of shops with the movie theater on Christie Street is a labyrinthine exploration of foods from around the world. You can get Korean barbeque, Japanese noodles, crepes (both sweet and savory), fish and chips, pizza, burritos, gyros and falafels, Indian curries over rice. I’m sure if you wanted a pig’s foot boiled in cabbage juice you could get it there. It’s random, overwhelming, and a little bit more than scary, which is why of the handful of times that I’ve found myself in that neck of the woods I’ve never eaten there, no matter how hungry I was.

But Jon was with me this time and we had a movie to make, so it seemed reasonable that we should eat there. After an informative journey assessing all our food options, we settled on cheesesteak sandwiches. The guy behind the counter was a boisterous Asian man who wanted to pump my ketchup and who said that his favorite was the cheesesteak with mushrooms, so we both ordered that with fries.

I wasn’t expecting much from my sandwich, but the enthusiasm that Asian Counter Man had made me really want to love my sandwich. I felt that if I didn’t love my sandwich he would be somehow disappointed and I didn’t want to let him down. But it was a bad sandwich. It’s hard for me to not like a sandwich—I don’t know if there’s a more perfect food than a sandwich—and I didn’t like this one.

The bread was a white bread roll that sucked up the meat juices but that fell apart along the edges so that the sandwich was a difficult endeavor to eat. The meat wasn’t meaty. I wasn’t sure what it was but it didn’t seem like any type of beef I’d eaten before. The mushrooms, surprisingly, were recognizable in taste and texture as mushrooms. However, it took me four bites to realize that the creaminess of the sandwich was the cheese. I don’t think that’s a good thing that it took me so long to figure out that what was in my mouth was cheese from something called a cheesesteak. I was only able to eat half of that sandwich.

As for the movie, Jon and I never made it. We had driven to Emeryville to eat bad cheesesteaks that left Jon with a weird sort of tension in his head and me with a strange feeling on my tongue. It was a sad night.