Over the years, I’ve helped hundreds of restaurants come up with special menu items to feature and make content about. I’ve been in restaurants where they slapped together a “special sandwich” in a few minutes by adding something like banana peppers to an already popular sandwich and calling it a special.
I hate to admit how many times I’ve been inside restaurants lately where they’re coming up with these special menu items, and by “coming up with them,” I mean they’re going to ChatGPT and asking, “What special menu item should I put on at my restaurant this week?”
Now, not to go off track here, but I do need to say for a quick minute: if you’re using ChatGPT to create special menu items at your restaurant, I’d suggest you stop creating special menu items at your restaurant. No matter your level of skill or ability or how long you’ve been in the restaurant industry, I feel like if you have to rely on ChatGPT to come up with a special menu item, then you don’t deserve to own a restaurant.
Listen, you may be a glorified burger flipper, but if you own a restaurant, I think you owe it to your customers and to yourself to at least Google how to balance flavors and come up with interesting combinations for your specials. If you’re just going to ChatGPT and making the first thing it tells you to make, then you really shouldn’t be creating specials.
And I say this based on my experience of going to restaurants that have used ChatGPT to create specials and having them be awful. I was at a restaurant not too long ago, and the owner said to me, “Oh man, we have this great new special on the menu that I just came up with. You’ve got to try it.” As she was assembling it and I was watching her, I thought to myself, “This seems like a child just started throwing food on bread and calling it a special.” I took one bite and knew it wasn’t good. I asked her where she got the idea, and she said, “Oh, I went on ChatGPT recently and had it help me come up with a bunch of new specials. Aren’t they great?” I just smiled and went on my way.
So please, if you’re relying on ChatGPT to create your special menu items, please stop. And now, on with the originally intended blog.
The crew over at Fair Deli spends a lot of time creating special menu items. I forget whether this is the second or third year the Ross Sandwich has been on special, but they’ve had some version of a Thanksgiving sandwich special for a while now.
I’ve always found it impressive when a restaurant can show the restraint to release special menu items only when they’re supposed to come out — like this Thanksgiving sandwich, which is only available during the month of November. From what I’ve been told, this sandwich sells really, really well, and it would be understandable and easy for Fair Deli to release it three or four times a year just to grab money. But they show extreme restraint and have such respect for this special sandwich that they only release it in November, as it should be.
The sandwich is a beast. They start with a thick slice of bread that gets a healthy spread of their house-made cranberry mayo. Next go three thick slices of oven-roasted turkey breast, then a layer of stuffing, and then they crunch up some fried onions and put those on top.
Next, they take a second piece of bread, fully submerge it in brown gravy they make from scratch, and put it in the middle of the sandwich. Then comes another layer of three thick slices of turkey breast, more stuffing, more crispy fried onions, and the final piece of bread with another layer of that cranberry mayo.
The sandwich is a nod to the famous episode of the hit TV show Friends where Ross takes the leftovers from Thanksgiving dinner and turns them into a sandwich he brings to work the next day. In the episode, his sister Monica, a trained chef, uses the same trick of submerging a piece of bread in gravy and putting it in the middle of the sandwich — what Ross calls “the Moist Maker.”
The sandwich is delicious. It’s everything you’d expect it to be: 95% of a Thanksgiving meal in sandwich form. And is it moist? You better believe it.
If I had one complaint, it would be that it’s not the easiest to eat. There’s just so much food involved, and it’s so incredibly moist, that it easily falls apart when you pick it up to take a bite. I feel like you’ll have an extra meal at the end from everything that falls out onto the tray below. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth getting. It just means you need to be prepared to have a mess on your hands. It took me six napkins to clean up my face and hands when I was done.
But the softness of the bread gives way to the wonderful aromatics of the rosemary and thyme in the stuffing. You can taste the sage in the oven-roasted turkey. You can feel that satisfying spice from the brown gravy. And the sweetness of the cranberry mayo puts this savory sandwich over the top. I know it sounds crazy, but it took everything inside of me not to go open a bag of Funyuns and add them to the sandwich. I feel like if you added that crazy crunch and onion flavor, you would really have something on your hands.
It clocks in at $17, and truth be told, if you add on two bags of chips and a couple of sodas, it would be a perfect meal for two people.
Would I go get it every week? No. But would I go get it at least once during the month of November? Absolutely. It’s a heavy meal that comes with a little bit of guilt, and it’s absolutely delicious.
Follow them on Instagram: @fairdeli
