Victory Memorial Parkway is especially beautiful in the fall. The trees that line the wide boulevard explode in yellow and orange, and there’s a near-constant breeze. Even the squirrels seem somehow more playful and less annoying.
Nothing beats a bike ride around here on an autumn afternoon, with the sun warming your back and the wind gently whipping fallen leaves around you.
And that’s before you get to the sign with bubble letters promising “SEXY SANDWICHES.”
Marcus and Kelsey Brandt are Twin Cities hospitality veterans; he’s worked for Creekside Supper Club and helped open Earl Giles Distillery, and she was on the founding team at Utepils Brewing. But Sandwich Club, the sunshine-yellow food truck located just past that hand-drawn sign, is the couple’s first solo venture.
“To live where we work is really important to us and our family,” Kelsey tells Racket.
Adds Marcus, “We just decided that we needed something on the North Side.”
The Brandts have been in this part of town practically forever; their daughter is a sixth-generation North Sider, and Kelsey’s family has lived there since the 1880s. There’s nowhere they’d rather be.
But like many of their neighbors, they’re acutely aware of the lack of options, especially food and drink options, that exist in north Minneapolis.
Earlier this year, they decided—what the hell?—they could do something about that. Be the change, ya know? So the Brandts made a business plan and leased their truck, setting up along the parkway for the first time in late June. “We’ve been doing it for 15 or 16 weeks now? It’s funny, it’s like a child—you speak in weeks for a long time,” Marcus smiles.
Sandwich Club is out there from Wednesday to Friday each week. And while the couple says those first few weeks were a little rocky, the club is hopping these days, especially as neighbors have made a weekly Sandwich Club stop part of their routines.
Kelsey says about 30% of their customers on a daily basis are returning visitors, a “weird and awesome” statistic that proves how much folks over North want more things like this to exist. As we chat, Tom, “one of their most regular regulars,” hops out of his car to order a sandwich, a cup of soup, and a few cookies.
Two standards, the Banh Boi ($17) and Bodega Buddy ($15), are available at the Sandwich Club window every week. The latter is like a chopped cheese with pickled jalapeños—and buddy, it’s good.
For these sandwiches, Marcus trench cuts a French hoagie roll that’s soft on the inside and a little crispy on the outside and carves out the innards. He then stuffs that bready canoe full of meat, cheese, and veggies—in the case of the Bodega Buddy, savory seasoned beef and sauteed onions, along with a mix of provolone and American cheese—for a sandwich that’s self-contained and supremely craveable.
It’s a gooey, cheesy umami bomb, topped with house-made pickles and pickled jalapeños. The way my dog looked at me while I wolfed down this sandwich… I thought I might not be long for this world.
The Banh Boi is a fried shrimp po' boy/bánh mì mashup dressed with a sweet Thai chili mayo and fresh veggies, and many of the rotating sandwiches Marcus develops for the menu each week are like this, the product of asking, “What if we did X with Y?” One recent creation was a butter chicken meatball sub, and a cold buffalo chicken salad with red onion fritters on top was a hit earlier this summer.
“I like to mash things together and sometimes be ignorant of all of those lines,” Marcus says. He’s not embarrassed to make “mistakes” or combine unexpected ingredients, and sandwiches are an approachable and forgiving medium.
Sandwich Club’s spot at 4499 Victory Memorial Dr., just six blocks from the Brandts’ house, is one of just a handful of food truck locations available through the Minneapolis Park Board, yet it’s long been underserviced. “We hear from people constantly at this window about, ‘We always wondered why there’s no food here,’” Marcus says. It’s a prime place right along the Grand Rounds Scenic Byway, where people can bike, walk, or pull over and park their car.
“We had such a beautiful summer getting to know all our neighbors,” Kelsey says, asking folks what they like and figuring out what’s working while honing their brand of “fine-dining service on this little yellow truck.”
The Brandts want people to see that there’s so much more to the North Side than just Broadway, and they hope that their truck—and the brick-and-mortar business they’re scheming up right now—can be a destination as much as it is a reliable point for those in the neighborhood.
They’ve seen that it can happen: On Friday evenings, Marcus says, families walk over hauling kids and blankets, then settle in for sandwiches on the lawn. Kelsey brings their daughter down while someone else steps in to take orders for a few hours.
“I look out, and it’s literally the next generation of the neighborhood, all with their shirts off, screaming, and running around sticky with peanut butter,” Marcus grins.
That’s the future the Brandts and their neighbors want.
Sandwich Club
Address: 4499 Victory Memorial Dr., Minneapolis
Hours: Wednesday-Friday, 12-6 p.m. through November 29
