Sandwiched Review: Eating sandwiches at Sandwiched
Life imitates art. That’s the saying, right? Growing up the way I do, the way I look at the world works as follows: If I see a fancy restaurant make a familiar dish, then the fancy restaurant is trying to copy the familiar dish to ‘elevate’ it for an average joe like myself. It never occurs to me that fast food sometimes does the same thing. I was reading on Freakonomics.com about copyright laws for the fashion industry. For the fashion industry in the U.S., it’s normal for knockoff companies to make stuff fashioned after what’s hot. It should make sense for restaurants to do the same thing. So when I saw the chicken schnitzel sandwich at Sandwiched, I immediately thought of the chicken sandwich at Burger King.
Check it. You have a submarine shaped bread, fried chicken, some greens, and boom! Super awesomeness. Sure, the one at Sandwiched is fried to order and the chicken is much better quality. At BK, the chicken probably comes from some weird chicken farm and it’s probably pre-fried and then heated up with a microwave or something. At Sandwiched, the ‘greens’ is actually black truffle-celery slaw. At BK it’s mystery mayo and wimpy lettuce. So the taste is definitely way better at Sandwiched.
Lightly breaded, the chicken wasn’t surrounded by a super crunchy hard shell. Having said that, the chicken was fried to my liking. The price tag was a bit harder to swallow. $15 dollars for this fried goodness at Sandwiched. Worth it? Hummm… I’m not sure. Maybe not for a cheap consumer like me.
I also tried the s’more ‘sandwich’. $4 for a graham cracker smaller than my palm… sure it was tasty but it was just really small. The value proposition for normal consumers probably is not a good one. Although if you consider the type of people who visit museums the most (read: tourists), then you want to price it slightly higher than normal because those folks will pay it. The other folks that go are people who know the Danny Meyer name and know what the Union Square Hospitality Group is all about.
So I’m trying something new here with the blog. I’m going to start putting key words in my URL. I want to know if my readers care at all. To explain, search engines place emphasis on things like the url or file name, words in the title tag (up to a point), and more emphasis on words near the top. Search engines also like crosslinks and that’s why you see people set up things like tags. Knowing all this, one of the strategies would be to put key words in the url. Instead of something like sandwiched.html, it’s what you see above: eating-sandwiches-at-sandwiched-danny-meyer-union-square-hospitality-whitney-museum-upper-east-side.html. As a web developer, I’m not sure what to think of that. Do screen readers for the blind read out titles of a webpage? the URL? Maybe this forum is more for food than it is about best practices for web development. I saw this strategy put in play and it struck me as unbelievably shady. It’s like if I’m going to talk about Danny Meyer and the Union Square Hospitality group then the title will go towards informing the reader what it’s about. Just imagine a subject line in an email or something like that. And while I’m at it, would it be annoying to do a set of ‘key words at the bottom of each post? just for search engine optimization? I’ll do it, you tell me what it’s like.
Restaurant: Sandwiched
Food category: sandwiches, cafe, American (traditional)
Price range: moderate (for sandwiches), expensive if you’re cheap like me
Neighborhood: Upper East Side
Proprietor: Danny Meyer
Restaurant Group: Union Square Hospitality Group
Location: Whitney Museum at the lower level
Sandwiched945 Madison Ave.New York, NY 10021212-570-3600
Posted by Danny on March 18, 2010 at 1:50 pm
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