From the Ramen Burger to Nutelasagna, the city has seen oodles of noodle-based culinary mashups in the past year, each attempting to push the palate while using one of comfort food’s most flexible — literally — canvases.
Now, a beloved Franken-bite born in Long Island City is making a comeback — and reminding everyone that it came first.
After great demand and an online outcry, M. Wells Dinette (22-25 Jackson Ave., Long Island City), the French-Canadian restaurant inside MoMA PS1, has put its Spaghetti Bolognese Sandwich back on the menu.
The restaurant stopped serving the sandwich about a year ago to focus on seasonal fare, but last week it restored the sammy to the lunch service, and diners are already ravenous for it.
Customers are queuing up en masse to try the fabled bun buster, with the restaurant selling as many as 100 per day.
“It’s been insane,” says Aidan O’Neal, chef at M. Wells. “We’ll get get a ticket to fire up seven at a time for one table, and then another will come in, and another.”
O’Neal admits that he wasn’t a fan of the sandwich concept when M. Wells owner Hugue Dufour came up with it four years ago.
“We cooks all kind of scoffed at the idea,” he says. “But he was right; it’s very, very good.”
To make the sandwich, the chef begins with “a really classic tomato sauce that’s just garlic, tomatoes and olive oil.” then combines the red gravy with pecorino cheese and chopped cooked pasta. The mixture is then lightly coated in egg and baked for 10 minutes inside of a blini pan to form a patty.
“The result is crispy on the outside, and very juicy on the inside,” says O’Neal, 29. “We serve it on a toasted onion roll with extremely delicious garlic butter and a layer of chopped Caesar salad with red pepper flakes.”
Served in a basket alongside a pile of housemade potato chips, the meal is definitely not for the faint of carb — which may be part of its winter-menu appeal.
During one lunch service this week, nearly every other seat at the restaurant was littered with remains from the $13 repast.
“It seems like a strange idea that shouldn’t work, but it did,” says Sophia Flood, 30, a Brooklyn artist who had just cleaned her plate. “I really liked how crispy it was, with lots of different textures.”
Jason Nickel, 43, an installer at MoMA PS1, flashed the hand gesture for OK from the other end of the table.
“I devoured mine,” the Queens resident says proudly. “It was great.”
For his part, O’Neal is amused at the enthusiastic reaction. “The positive response has been very flattering,” he says. “It’s funny that such a silly sandwich can get people so excited.”