Archived Article By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published September  , 2006 Click here for the current edition Praise The Poor Boy Today (October 9) is National Poor Boy Day. Let's start with linguistics. As a matter of style, I've always used the expression "poor boy" for the sandwich in preference to what is now the more common (in more ways than one) "po-boy." Here's why. It's well documented who invented the poor boy sandwich: Bennie and Clovis Martin. It happened during the famous streetcar strike of the late 1920s. The idea was to provide the "poor boys" out on the picket lines with a big, filling sandwich containing only scraps of meat for a low price—originally a nickel. The original poor boy sandwich was the potato sandwich: French fries on French bread, wet down with roast beef gravy and any scraps of meat that might have made their way into it. The name of the restaurant where all this took place was Martin's Poor Boy Restaurant. I had (until the storm) the final menu from Martin's, of which I was a regular customer in its last few years. It says, "Martin's Poor Boy Restaurant. No Branches. We Serve Margarine." Its sandwiches were called poor boys. Not po-boys. It's their baby. They get naming rights. I use their spelling. The Martin brothers persuaded their baker--John Gendusa's, a couple of blocks up Touro--to make a special extra-long loaf of French bread that was the same thickness from end to end. At that time, the standard French bread was shaped like a double-ended torpedo, with a wide middle and tapering ends. And so the sandwich as we know it was created. I think a well-made roast beef poor boy in the classic restaurant-and-bar style is one of the most delicious eats in this great eating town. It was the taste that turned me on to dining out. I was about eight years old and my Uncle Billy brought me to his neighborhood bar. Clarence and Lefty's was a joint on Almonaster Street near Galvez, and like many bars around town it made poor boy sandwiches. (In fact, at that time more poor boys were sold in bars than in restaurants.) It was so good I ate two of them. I can recall that taste to this day. When I got home from that visit, my father and I had a long talk about roast beef poor boys. He revealed his personal feeling on the matter, which was that the most important thing about a roast beef poor boy is that the bread be very fresh and then toasted till it's so hot you can hardly pick it up. I have never changed my criteria for a great roast beef poor boy. What I look for is homemade beef and gravy like Clarence and Lefty's, and hot French bread. Which is how Martin's made theirs, although I didn't discover that until I was in college. Not that the beef isn't important. Most local poor boy shops buy their beef already cooked, sometimes already sliced. This is not a terrible thing if the supplier is a good one (Chisesi makes a great roast beef, for example). But that still leaves the gravy to be made, and there's no short cut for that. And it's gravy that makes the sandwich unique. You can find roast beef sandwiches that look like poor boys all over America. Some are good--the Philly cheese steak sandwich, for example. But none tastes like a roast beef poor boy. The myth grew up that the sloppier the sandwich, the better. I do not subscribe to that theory. I have encountered some poor boys with so much gravy that they were impossible to eat. There's a golden mean here, and only the really good shops get it right. The best poor boy shops have many other kinds of poor boys, including unusual meats like liver cheese and hogshead cheese (together?) Of them all, I think the most underrated is the ham poor boy and its variants. A poor boy made with Chisesi ham (which is so superior to anything else out there that no great poor boy shop would be without it) is already great--especially if the bread is toasted. But one of the best poor boys over at the old Martin's is becoming rare: broiled ham and cheese. It was not actually broiled, but fried like bacon on the grill. The fact that the grill was usually a little greasy with other things that had been there helped. If you ever hear of or see a "broiled combination," as it is called in the old places, get it. It's on a par with a good roast beef. Then we have all the fried seafood poor boys, about which I have this article of faith: they're best without the lettuce and tomato and mayonnaise dressing, the bread being slathered with melted butter, the seafood doused with hot sauce, and a bunch of pickles thrown in for acidity and textural contrast. The poor boy universe is a unique and essential part of the dining scene in New Orleans. Any place with a good poor boy gets a star on my mental culinary map. © 2006 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com