The Dreaming Game: The Stolen Rocket

Last week I described the restaurant I’m dreaming about opening, Breakfast At Night, and shared a draft of its menu. This week, I want to tell you about one of the sandwiches on the menu.

This is not my sandwich. I stole it. I got the recipe from 1369 Coffee House, a cafe in Cambridge. It may seem odd for the first sandwich on my menu to be a sandwich I didn’t come up with. If Breakfast At Night is an exercise in dreaming, in creative fantasy, what is a recipe already in reality doing in the mix? Well, the power of this project for me is creating a perfect vibe, and this sandwich is perfect. It’s also what drew my attention to how special breakfast sandwiches are in the first place.

Not to get too schematic about it, but as I’ve meditated on the perfection of The Rocket, as 1369 calls its masterpiece, I’ve come to think of the sandwich as having a V-shaped culinary structure. The first arm of the V is about warmth, richness, and savoriness. The main ingredient along this arm is scrambled egg: steaming hot, fluffy, and light. This arm is extended further by sharp cheddar, mixed into the egg, just enough to make it richer and silkier. In fact, the cheese is added with such a light hand that I ate the sandwich a few times without realizing it was there, which I think speaks to a masterful restraint on 1369’s part.

There’s this impulse when restaurants are designing sandwiches to keep adding ingredients, each one as its own dimension, trying to make a complex meal. The golden raisins I found recently in a “cauliflower shawarma” sandwich from an upscale chain in Boston are an example of this. They didn’t go with the rest of the sandwich, but I understood why the restaurant had added them: the other ingredients weren’t exciting, let alone tasty, enough on their own. Those golden raisins shout, “Notice me! I promise this sandwich isn’t boring! You’re cool for eating me!” The sandwich, and so much of the fast-but-fancy food marketed to busy professionals on their lunch break, was all about signals, not substance.

1369’s Rocket and its use of cheddar are the complete opposite. The cheddar doesn’t add a new dimension; it just doubles down on the savoriness of the eggs, extending that dimension. The cheddar doesn’t care if you notice it; it knows it’s doing its job whether or not it gets credit. While the golden raisins shout, the cheddar doesn’t say a mumbling word.

When 1369 adds an ingredient, it’s for a reason. Each additional ingredient is a thoughtful reaction to the sandwich, enhancing or contrasting and balancing what’s already there. The second arm of the V brings that balance. It’s all about brightness, sharpness, and acid. It begins with the tang of fluffy, chewy, thick-cut sourdough, builds with fresh, spicy arugula, and shoots ahead with pickled red onion. The two arms of the V meet in a single ingredient, “dijonaise.” It is fitting that an ingredient that is itself an emulsification of a fat and an acid should bind the sandwich’s flavor dimensions together. The mayo enhances the richness of the eggs and cheese, and the tang of the dijon mustard heightens the sharpness of the other acidic ingredients.

As I think about Breakfast At Night and develop the other sandwiches on my menu, The Rocket is the standard against which I’ll judge my recipes. Game recognize game.