Happy Sandwich Week, motherfuckers.
In a mad dash of editorial improvisation, we decided that yesterday's deluge of sandwich content should snowball through Friday, thus giving us Sandwich Week. Tune out the emboldened fascism; embrace the tasty stuff squished between bread... at least for the next couple days.
As the sandwich chatter proliferated our website and social feeds, one name kept popping up: Ham's Sandwich Shop. No, not a misspelling of the elite beer with the visibly schnockered mascot. We're talking about the nondescript Minnetonka strip-mall sandwich shop that opened in 1990. There's very little Ham's history online, and our requests to chat with the owner(s) remain unrequited. All we know is the affordable, no-nonsense restaurant is a favorite of local Redditors, having popped up in several best Twin Cities sandwich threads. Tony Cu, the great local food review dude, visited last fall and drove away impressed.
Before we hash out the merits of Ham's, a mea culpa-ish disclaimer: We neglected the "Ham's Top 10 Sandwiches" chalkboard, which touts the best seller (El Diablo, $9.99, a spicy turkey sammie) and the big talker (The Train Wreck, $10.59, a deli sandwich featuring freaking ground taco meat). Instead, we ventured to the obscure reaches of the back menu for The Most Interesting Sandwich In the World. I'm not usually suckered by marketing copy, but come on! And while the friendly young cashier couldn't tell me the origins of the name, he assured me it's "really good." Good enough!
The hefty grilled sandwich—roasted pork, ham slices, pulled pork, Swiss, chipotle mayo, jalapeno mustard, pickles—arrives piping hot inside tin foil wrapping. At $10.49, it's priced out of the hallowed halls of Best Budget Bites, though Ham's sandwiches top out at $12, with most listed at $9.99. A bargain, even if not defined so by our unbreachable BBB parameters.
How does the thing taste? Pretty damn good, perhaps just shy of the "really good" promised to me by the phone-scrolling cashier.
The exterior of the ciabatta bun is grilled to buttery perfection, creating a crunchy shell that gives way to softer fluff below. The maximalist mountains of meat don't rise to the level of, say, Clancy's, but that's not really the promise of a $10 strip-mall sandwich. The dueling pork products are fall-apart tender and smoky; the thinly sliced deli ham gets lost in the chaos. I'm almost certain the chipotle is Boar's Head Bold Fiery Chipotle Gourmaise Spread—not bad, not inoffensively spicy. If the promise is a meaty and melty meal at a price that rivals Subway or Jimmy John's while leapfrogging chain quality, then promise delivered.
But! Crucially, does The Most Interesting Sandwich In the World live up to its hyperbolic name? It does not. Putting taco meat on a sandwich is interesting to the point of lunacy, so next time—and there will be a next time, provided we're hungry for lunch and in the western 'burbs—we're copying Tony Cu and opting for The Train Wreck. Oh, and with apologies to the ozone layer and all thinking people, we punched the "most interesting" Q into Google for answers, which produced this braindead AI answer. Now you... still don't know!
Ham's Sandwich Shop
Address: 14200 Wayzata Blvd., Minnetonka
Hours: 8 a.m.-7 p.m. weekdays; 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday; closed Sunday
