south side sandwiches: sweet steak

the hoagie place

The Hoagie Place
8147 S. Halsted St, Chicago, IL, USA

Chicago winters are pretty goddamn draining. There are only so many days in a row of shitty grey blah I can handle before I'm about ready to move to Miami and become a major linchpin in the international drug trade.

That's why when you get a random 50-degrees-and-sunny day in the middle of February, you spring to life and start crossing everything off your goddamned bucket list. What's on mine? South Side Sandwiches, motherfucker! Specifically: Sweet Steak!

the hoagie place

The Hoagie Place ain't much to look at, just your basic walk-up food shack with just enough indoor space to accommodate the folks in line. I'd imagine the line gets a bit cuckoo when it's really busy, but it was pretty mellow when I got there. Service was a little slow, but according to customer grumbling, that's not the norm here. What is the norm is Chicago-style hoagies done right.

sweet steak

Regular sweet steak, $5.24 with tax, fries included. Goddamn, what a sandwich! I think it's possible this sandwich was my soul mate. It's everything you want in a greasemeat sandwich and then some. Falling somewheres between a barbecue beef and a Philly Cheese Steak, the Sweet Steak comes slathered in sweet steak sauce, onions, peppers, and chopped neon-green sweet pickles; the American cheese almost gets lost amidst all the sweet 'n' meat and the super-soft roll. The fries were fine; I only had a few (fig. 3).

Oozy boozy, what a goddamn sandwich! Definitely should have gone with the large size. If I had to ding this place for anything, it's simply for having such great food but nowhere to eat it. I made haste to my car and inhaled it; for once not sitting in my car inhaling compressed air cans!

Review by Pumboo Dongo-Dohnoh, February 2020

More South Side Sandwiches:
Breaded Steak ~ Ricobene's
The Freddy ~ Calabria Imports
The Mother-In-Law ~ Fat Johnnie's
Pork Chop ~ Jim's Original