Like Central Grocery's muffuletta, Zinnante's Paisano is served on a round roll and contains ham, cheese, salami and olive salad. But Zinnante's round bread is softer than the stiff rolls used in New Orleans, which is both good and bad -- bad if you like your bread crusty, but good if you're planning to eat the sandwich right away.
Eating a muffuletta at Central Grocery right after you buy it is a mistake. The bread is so hard that you can barely bite through it, and the pressure exerted by your jaw causes olive oil to gush out and run down your arm. In fact, experienced muffuletta eaters buy their sandwiches in advance so that the oil will have time to soak into the bread and soften it. My personal aging strategy calls for buying the sandwiches in the morning (Central Grocery opens at 8 a.m.) and placing them in a cooler. If I'm on the way home to Houston, I flip them over around Lake Charles so that the oil gets evenly distributed to both sides of the bread. By dinnertime, they're just about perfect. It's a lot of bother for a sandwich, but it's quite a sandwich.
Zinnante's Paisano may not be an exact imitation of a muffuletta, but it will never be faulted for skimpy ingredients. A monumental inch-thick layer of ham dominates the interior of the sandwich; the salami, provolone and olive salad serve as mere decorations. I cut mine in half and ate it for lunch again the next day. Pay attention to Ms. Z and get a half; a whole Paisano is a two-day sandwich.
Like the catfish poor boy, the other fried seafood poor boys at Zinnante's are outstanding. The crawfish poor boy was overflowing with crispy mudbugs. I also tried a sautéed shrimp poor boy, which was a bad idea for a sandwich to go. The shrimp are wonderfully seasoned, but they soak through the roll in minutes, turning the bread on the bottom to mush. Stick with the deep-fried shrimp if you're taking it with you.
Zinnante's roasts its own beef, and it looks nice and rare, although for some strange reason they put the roast beef sandwich I ordered into the microwave, which turned the meat gray. I'll have to remember to specify cold roast beef in the future.
The meatball and Italian sausage sandwiches are very good as well, but I discovered that there's a big difference between the East Coast and the Louisiana-Italian versions of these sandwiches. An Italian sausage sandwich in New England features Italian sausage split in half lengthwise and grilled with onions and green peppers -- no red sauce. And a meatball sandwich is made with huge meatballs sliced into several flat pieces, then covered with red sauce and cheese and baked.
In the Louisiana-Italian version, whole meatballs or a whole link of sausage is placed in the poor boy roll with lots of red gravy and cheese on top, then heated. They're quite tasty, but very difficult to eat. A whole link of Italian sausage is difficult to tear with your teeth, forcing you to squish the bread as you try to get a firm grip.
Ms. W got the meatball sandwich on our first visit. The little meatballs popped out when she tried to bite the sandwich, so she put it down and took it apart. She ended up eating the meatballs with a fork and leaving much of the delectable cheese-covered, red sauce-drenched bread sitting on the plate. The waste was too much for me to bear.
I accused Ms. W of inventing an arcane diet in which she subtracted a few calories from everything she ate. She countered that I was caught up in dumb girl-on-a-diet stereotypes. After some reflection, she suggested that it was probably a control issue: Just because a restaurant put a sandwich together in a certain way didn't mean she had to eat it like that. By subtracting ingredients, she was seeking to balance the ratios: meat to cheese, fillings to bread, etc. (Does this represent a need to balance her life?) Of course, Ms. W was quick to point out that I take my sandwiches apart too, so I can add salt, hot sauce, pepper, Parmesan -- really, anything will do. I guess I have control issues, too. (Is there a psychoanalyst in the house?)
I don't know what all this means, but as we got up to leave Zinnante's that afternoon, I grabbed the red sauce-soaked bread Ms. W had left behind and ate it on the way home. It was scrumptious.
