Sometimes, when I’m speaking to friends about my food adventures, they seem to think I’m only about tweezer food, molecular gastronomy, and expensive restaurants. And since any new friends I made during the Nebula Awards weekend might have encountered my previous post about Morcilla as their first entry point into my life, I figured I’d better quickly prove that’s just not so, and describe the sandwich I ate many hours after the banquet, at 2:30 a.m. on Saturday night Sunday morning at Primanti’s.

Though Primanti’s is today a chain which includes locations in Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, and other states, the company began with a single restaurant in Pittsburgh in 1933. Not too long after that, it developed its signature way of serving sandwiches—with the french fries and cold slaw in the sandwich. That style is so much a part of Primanti’s I can recall what a server there said when asked in a video interview how they’d respond to a customer if one asked for the fries on the side—she’d tell them there was a Subway down the street.

Perhaps I’m misremembering, and that’s apocryphal, but Primanti’s commitment to keeping what’s normally outside inside has resulted in one of the most famous sandwiches in the U.S. So I had to have one.

I had to have one at the original Pittsburgh location, which is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

And I had to have one not at a standard meal time, but late. Or depending on how you consider time, early.

Which is how I ended up with a group of friends, including Andrea Tatjana and K. M. Szpara, at 2:30 in the morning, still wearing the purple jacket I’d worn to the Nebula banquet. (more…)