Summer sandwich world

The grinder is the official sandwich of south Des Moines.

Summer is sandwich time in Iowa. We consume more hot dogs, more burgers, more carryout and more sandwiches in the warm season, probably because we are looking for something to eat while also doing something else. 

Des Moines’ metro has some new options for meals on the go. Graziano’s set the new standard for Italian lunch sandwiches when they began serving them 100 years into their history. But the revered southside grocer and deli is not convenient to many in the rapidly expanding metro. 

Mema’s is a rather new joint on East First Street in Grimes, a restaurant row that keeps adding new players — Sol Agave, Slim Chickens, Culver’s, Heavenly Delights, Uptown Grill, Mustang Grill, Asian, and the superb Destination Grill. Chad Cline says he began working in his grandmother Helen’s Italian pizzeria and sandwich shop when he was 7 years old. In 2018, he opened a food truck specializing in Italian grinders, and now it’s a brick and mortar pizza and sandwich shop open for carryout and delivery only. 

Sandwiches are excellent — grinders, Italian beef, sausage, spicy Italian, chicken breasts, portobello and combos of all those stars. They are made in two sizes. Pizza are sold in three versions of size and crust with most of the sandwich offerings available as pies, even Italian roast beef. 

The banh mi is Gov. Robert Ray’s sandwich gift to Iowa. The French Indochinese sandwich depends on a rare rice bread, usually provided in Des Moines by the bakery at C Fresh. 

The grinder is the official sandwich of south Des Moines.

Paris Banh Mi (PBM) is a different S.E. Asian experience. First of all, its founders are from Paris and Saigon, and the restaurant began in Orlando, Florida. Secondly, unlike most banh mi options, it sells no soup or entrees. And it occupies a handsome space in a Windsor Heights block that has become a restaurant row in its own right with Puerto Rican, Jewish, Nepalese, East European and Mexican cafés, plus a few international grocers, a coffee shop and a bakery with legendary Iowa roots. 

PBM is itself an excellent bakery, specializing in French desserts and rice bread. They serve a pork and pate stuffed puff pastry (pate chaud) that is a taste of heaven. They also have good energy with well trained staff making exotic smoothies, teas, coffees, desserts and sandwiches. On my visits, they have drawn good crowds of extraordinary diversity — young, old, Asian, Euro-Am, etc. 

Sandwiches come as banh mi (rice flour hoagies), croissants, burgers, corn dogs, baguettes and puff pastries. Mostly they employ grilled pork, pork pate, ham, pork bologna, shredded chicken and pork patties with cilantro, cucumber, daikon, jalapenos, carrots, onions and four sauces. Baguettes used sizzling beef, fried eggs and lots of sauce. They remind me more of drunken tortas than of banh mi. Most drinks are cold, so summer is also the season of banh mi. 

Faustino’s expands the footprint of the metro taqueria west to Beaverdale. They keep the menu faith of the taqueria spirit with two soft tortilla tacos, plus cheeks, cactus, tongue, tripe, birria and more familiar things. They have consommés with birria, plus picaditas (a take on sopes but often made on comals rather than in fryers), real pastor with pineapple, and a self-serve condiments bar that reminds one of time before COVID. ♦

Jim Duncan is a food writer who has been covering the central Iowa scene for more than five decades.