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Dylan Thuras: It’s a hot day in New York City. It’s pushing 90 degrees outside, and you need lunch. So you’ve come to Harlem, to 110th Street, and you’re here for a reason. You are in search of a particular store that sells a very particular sandwich.
If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you’d probably just pass it by. It’s a deli, something you’d find on, you know, basically every block in New York. But this is not just any deli. This one is called Hajji’s, and it claims to have invented the very sandwich that you seek.
So you walk inside. The AC is blasting, it is exquisite. And second, you notice that it is absolutely bustling in here. You have walked into the middle of the lunch rush. There are 10 customers crammed all around you in this tiny store, ordering sandwiches. And beyond that, there is one pervasive sound.
This is what you’ve come here for, because this is the sound of a chopped cheese sandwich coming to life. Ground beef, melted cheese, chopped up on a flat-top grill. Maybe you add lettuce, tomato, some onion, some ketchup, some mayo. You put it on a roll, and you have found heaven.
I mean, it sounds simple, I guess. It is kind of a cheeseburger, all chopped up. It seems like, what is there even to say? But I cannot think of another sandwich out there that has become such an unbelievable cultural lightning rod.
I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. This episode was produced in partnership with New York City Tourism. Today, we’re getting very close, and very personal, with a chopped cheese sandwich. It is a sandwich so storied, you might even call it a kind of a folk sandwich. And we will look at the bodega and deli culture that brought this heroic sandwich to life.
This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Dylan: So, here is the apocryphal story of how the chopped cheese was invented. It was here at Hajji’s Deli at 110th Street in Harlem when a cook produced the first sandwich.
One story goes that a cook was asked to make a Philly cheesesteak and improvised with the ingredients that they had on hand. I like this story, that seems plausible. Another says that a cook ran out of circular burger buns, so chopped up a cheeseburger to fit a hero roll instead. Maybe. And yet another version says that the cook—this is my favorite—had dental issues, and he was just trying to make a sandwich that was easier to chew. That’s a good one.
Whatever the true story is, the chopped cheese was born. Also, you can call it a chop cheese. Chopped cheese, chop cheese, same thing.
I’m going to go and just say right up front here: We don’t know. We have no idea. The origins of sandwiches turn out to be extremely murky. But generally, people agree that this sandwich originated somewhere uptown in some deli, some bodega, sometime around the late ’90s, maybe early 2000s.
Jeremy Batista: I was very young. I think I was like maybe 12 or 13, first time I ate a chopped cheese, that’s 2002, 2003. And I had it at her store.
Dylan: This is Jeremy Batista. He’s lived in the Bronx his entire life. And the store that he is talking about is his mom’s bodega.
Jeremy: It was an order that she messed up, I believe it was. And she was like, “Yo, here, just have this. I don’t want to throw it away.” My mom hates throwing away stuff. So I ate it. I was like, oh man, this is incredible. It was one of my favorite things.
Dylan: Chopped cheese quickly became a deli and bodega staple. It’s pretty cheap. It is reliably delicious. It is simple. And what’s not to like? But New York is a big place. And in fact, even just within the boroughs, the chopped cheese is kind of like a regional thing.
Jeremy: No, trust me, there’s people who come to me all the time and is like, “I lived in New York my entire life, and I’ve never had a chopped cheese.” So it’s crazy that they come to me, and they’re like 40 years old, and they’re just discovering the chopped cheese.
Dylan: A few years ago, it seemed kind of like, it became like a thing. Everyone was like, ooh, discovering the sandwich. Well, I mean, the internet discovered it is what happened. The sandwich struck a kind of chord. Media companies sent reporters to make chopped cheese videos. There’s a recipe for it on The New York Times cooking section. Anthony Bourdain ate one in an episode of Parts Unknown.
And then you know what happened next. An Upper West Side restaurant caused an absolute uproar when they planned to sell the sandwich for 15 bucks, a pricey version of the chopped cheese, a very potent symbol of gentrification.
There have been many, many heated internet debates about this. You go down the rabbit hole if you want. It is so deep. But the controversy of the chopped cheese aside, like with a lot of food origin stories, the real story is the rich culture and history that gave birth to this sandwich: The corner store culture, which it came from.
Anibal Arocho: Bodegas are the anchors of your neighborhood. They are the place that is a constant in a city that’s full of change.
Dylan: This is Anibal Arocho.
Anibal: Whether that’s demographic change, economic change, social change, you can count on finding a bodega where you know you can get something to drink, you can get something decent to eat at a relatively cheap price, and any random things that you might need for your apartment, whether that’s batteries or a set of headphones or last-minute gifts, you can find them in the bodega.
Dylan: Anibal comes from a long line of bodega owners, and he even grew up above his family’s bodega. The store was on the first floor. His family lived on the second story.
Anibal: I remember distinctly sitting on the deli refrigerator with my legs dangling there and just looking at all the people come and go. They were known for their sandwiches. This is like pre-chopped cheese. This bodega didn’t have a grill or anything like that, but the thing that my grandfather was known for was he would make pernil, so traditional Puerto Rican seasoned pork shoulder, like roasted pork shoulder, and they would cure their own Virginia hams and things like that and do stuff. For the holidays, they would roast a whole pig in the back of the bodega kitchen area, which was pretty cool.
Dylan: You know that’s a good bodega. If you walk into the bodega and there is a whole pig roasting in the back, that’s a good bodega. Side note, maybe you have noticed that I’ve been going back and forth between saying deli and bodega, maybe corner store. They’re not exactly the same thing. Traditionally, bodegas are Latino-owned, but everyone we talked to for this episode said, you can say whatever you want, deli, bodega, corner store, you know when you see it. What is clear is that the first bodegas originated with Puerto Rican immigration to New York City, people like Anibal’s ancestors.
Besides having grown up above his family’s bodega, Anibal is also the library manager at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies Library and Archives, or the Centro. He says the earliest documented bodegas in the city started sometime around the 1920s, but a couple of decades later, bodega culture absolutely exploded.
Anibal: I would say that the time period where the bodega really skyrocketed to prominence was from the ’40s to the ’70s. We saw a tenfold increase in the number of Puerto Ricans in New York City. So what was originally a community of around 60,000 in 1940 grew to over 600,000 by 1980.
Dylan: Anibal says there were a few reasons for this. This is right around World War II. Air travel is getting popular. There was another reason, though, something called Operation Bootstrap. Operation Bootstrap has its own complicated, controversial history, but essentially, it was a government program between Puerto Rico and the U.S., which was meant to turn Puerto Rico from an essentially agrarian society into an industrialized one. It completely reshaped the island, and eventually, there were not enough industrial jobs to go around, and so the Puerto Rican government created an office specifically designed to push Puerto Rican immigration to New York City.
Anibal: So you have this huge post-World War II migration, and you have new Puerto Rican communities. They want the food from their homelands, and the bodega was that center focal point, much the same way that we rely on it now, the Puerto Rican communities, I would say, relied on it more so, and it served a greater social function than it does now.
Some people would get their mail delivered to the bodegas, especially if they were just renting a single room in an apartment or something like that. Many people did not have telephones, and the only place where you could make phone calls was to pay the bodeguero to use their phone. Also, it was where you would exchange gossip. That’s how you would stay up to date on local happenings in the neighborhood. Someone died. An apartment’s empty. Someone’s looking for work. It was also an engine of the informal economy, like a job bulletin board in its own way as well.
Dylan: Today, the corner stores that are the ancestors of these very first bodegas, they are everywhere. It can be hard to say a specific number, but the estimates are somewhere between 7,000 and 14,000 delis and bodegas across the city.
But back to the chopped cheese. The sandwich certainly came out of corner store culture, but in the past decade or so, it has spread well beyond the bodega. People with pretty real cred are putting their own spin on it. People like Kwame Onwuachi, who was raised in the Bronx, has since opened a fine dining restaurant called Tatiana. It’s in Lincoln Center, and of course, on the menu is a chopped cheese made with aged ribeye and truffles.
Then there are the guys behind Ghetto Gastro, which is a Bronx-based culinary collective. They have a recipe for something called a chopped “stease,” which is a vegan version of the sandwich.
Remember Jeremy, who tried his first chopped cheese in his mom’s bodega when he was a teenager? These days, he runs a food truck and two counter restaurants dedicated to the sandwich. They are called Bodega Truck and Bodega City.
Jeremy: It’s just my favorite thing to eat. Yes, you can get it anywhere in New York City, any bodega. You can go to any corner store to get a chopped cheese, but I would always remix it. I would add bacon and eggs. I would always do something different with the chopped cheese. It’s like, let me just make my own.
Dylan: Jeremy’s storefront is sort of an homage to the classic bodega. There’s a stuffed bodega cat sitting on the counter. Jeremy says that that’s the manager. And he’s got the place stocked with all of the nostalgic candies that you get in corner stores. Things like Fun Dip, the little gummy hamburgers—ah, they’re so good—or the bubble gum shaped like Band-Aids that comes in the metal container. You know what I’m talking about, these are classic, these are classic things.
Jeremy: This is the New York that I grew up in, the colorful bodegas with the lights and the candies and just a version of New York that’s slowly getting modernized and gentrified. It happens. Things change. You can’t expect some things to stay the same forever, so it is what it is.
Dylan: So Jeremy took his experience growing up in a bodega and turned it into a new iteration, and a new iteration of the chopped cheese. As for Anibal’s family, they sold their bodega when Anibal was about 10 years old.
Anibal: I pass by it like every single day, and I always like, I point out to everybody like, we used to own that. It was 712 9th Avenue, was the address.
Dylan: Ironically, that nostalgia does not mean you will find him in line for the famous bodega sandwich.
Anibal: I am not a chopped cheese guy.
Dylan: Listen, to each their own. I guess I’m an egg and cheese guy when it really comes down to it. Anyway, Anibal says the chopped cheese is one of these sandwiches that has entered that vaulted zone. It is now firmly considered what he calls a folk sandwich.
Anibal: Every folk sandwich has its origin story, right? The Philly cheesesteak, or the Italian beef, how a lot of societies developed the bow and arrow. Like, I’m sure that there was some bodeguero in Washington Heights who was like, “I’ve been making that for 10 years”, like, “What are you talking about?” So the chopped cheese definitely—if it didn’t happen in East Harlem, it would have happened somewhere.
Dylan: Somewhere in New York City. If you want to try a chopped cheese for yourself, you can, of course, head to Hajji’s Deli on 110th Street, 1st Avenue in Manhattan. They say they invented it, so you can go to the original source. Or you can hit up Jeremy at Bodega City, he has locations in Brooklyn and in the Bronx. Or you can literally just walk into any bodega on any block in New York City and say, “Give me a chopped cheese,” and it will be so good.
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