I Have Been Converted to the Religion of Aioli
After years of skepticism, I want to be baptized in a giant metal cup.
I am quite serious about The Sandwich Lifestyle. And at this point in the fringe of summer, new delicacies get hunted mercilessly, less out of intentional ravenousness and more as the result of the natural mercilessness with which water seeks and finds its level. Whatever sandwich one prefers has been a longstanding issue in the Guy/Dude debate, but in my neighborhood, there is a nifty decades-old establishment that makes these massive and saucy veal parms with hot peppers, onions, and mushrooms. Before all this talk devolves into a twitchy, omnibus Sandwich Remembering session, it is also worth noting that if you are at a restaurant and you order a sandwich or a wrap with a side of fries, and if these are served on a plate alongside a metal cup filled with pale orange dipping sauce, you are losing your goddamn mind. As Americans, as humans, we all have this in common.
This dipping condiment is known by many aliases: Chipotle aioli, spicy mayo, cajun ketchup, and some places even go with “Wacky Sauce.” As someone who considers themselves to have a somewhat-refined palette, I cringe at the thought of someone referring to this delectable sauce as a form of mayonnaise. It’s aioli. Respect the rebrand—it’s about the glow-up. Don’t devalue it just because you don’t understand it.
Maybe a packet of ketchup would suffice, or even a glass bottle plastered with a Heinz label even though we know it’s filled with that off-brand shit, but these dipping sauces are commonplace at gentrified establishments referred to as “gastropubs.” The type of place that’s a rebranded country pub with the old comfortable furnishing ripped out and replaced with whitewashed walls and stripped-back furniture, and its menu contains ordinary pub food at a 75% markup and the bartender looks disdainfully at you when you say you just want a table for a lager and a basket of fries. I hate the word “gastropub,” because it sounds like a place where the Mucinex snot monster would go to get drunk. I don’t want to think about the process of digestion while eating. If I was meant to see it, I’d have eyes in my gut.
Anyways, this dipping sauce has turned me into a cartoon wolf that just smelled a blueberry pie on the windowsill—my eyes are bulging out of my skull and I belch “AWOOGA!!” My hooting addiction has reached a point of debilitating indecision. I look at menus and pick what I want to eat based on the odds of that sandwich coming with a pale orange dipping sauce. There are days when I crave a tuna melt, but there isn’t even a parallel universe that contains the possibility of a tuna melt coming with pale orange dipping sauce, so I’ll choose something called a California Chicken Club.
When the good lord returns to earth, they will take a shape and a form we may not recognize. I see God every time I order a quesadilla for the table. Don’t look for me in the sunsets; look for me in the sauce that comes with your sweet potato fries.
Like the dip that you get when you order loaded fries at Lonestar Steakhouse...yummy!
Smith family lore has it that my ancestors became deadly ill at a picnic, with the likely cause being mayonnaise that had expired. Since then, my family has called mayo "white death", and I grew up with a deep psychologically-rooted aversion to mayonnaise.
A friend calls it "the devil's semen."