Romesco is a classic Catalan sauce with a robust, coarse-grained, and spreadable texture. Recipes vary, but you can expect most to include a blend of roasted red peppers, mild ñora chiles, garlic, hazelnuts or almonds, bread crumbs, olive oil, and occasionally, tomatoes. The allure of this sauce lies in its fine balance of smoky, sweet, and nutty flavors. It gets incorporated into a sandwich here. More
Making the pork for these Saturday sandwiches (both $8.95) itself is a three-day process: the shoulder roast gets coated in the same spice rub that Kelsey uses on the beef and cures for two days. (The result, he says, is "a dead ringer for guanciale.") Then he slow-roasts it and chills it overnight; that way, it reabsorbs all its flavorful juices and slices cleanly. More
Any town that specializes in slow-roasting one of my favorite meats (hello, pork) and combining it with one of my favorite vegetables (hello, broccoli rabe) and favorite cheeses (hello, sharp provolone) into a sandwich, is good in my book. Lenny's Home Plate is pretty far from South Philly, but they still make a killer South Philly-style hoagie. The meat—nicely fatty pork loin—is shaved ultra thin and cooked to that point that it's still rosy pink but the fat has started to completely melt, keeping everything nice and lubricated. Unfortunately, they'd already run out of broccoli rabe (understandably) so I settled for its slightly inferior stand-in, garlicky braised spinach. More
Thin slices of pork loin sizzle on a flat top as the cook at Manny's Tortas douses the meat with seasoning salt. The pork loin torta ($7.45) is available at both locations of the popular Minneapolis takeout restaurant, which offers ten tortas total, from steak to Hawaiian. More
Even if you come to Izzoz (pronounced eee-zoz) Tacos with the best intentions of ordering tacos, you may leave the cart with a pulled pork torta ($6.50), which is fine (as long as you also try the tacos at some point). The pork is juicy, slightly sweet and smoky with a punch of heat; it's been slow-roasting overnight with ancho chiles. More
