Sandwiches in NYC Have Become Enormous and Too Big to Eat. So I Tried Some.
22nd February 2026
As far as enduring New York City icons go, sky-high sandwiches are right up there with pizza, the Statue of Liberty, rats and Carrie Bradshaw. And right now, they’re having a major moment.
Let’s begin with the Mama’s Too Chicken Alla Vodka sandwich — arguably New York’s current social media champ in the big-sammy category — which combines cutlets, vodka sauce, pesto and burrata for a “messy and beautiful” handheld that could get you “a bit turned on.”
I’ve also seen and heard talk of the “dumb-good” Gargiulo Burger, a roast beef plus patty plus broth creation at Brennan & Carr in Sheepshead Bay that had one guy invoking the Sign of the Cross and murmuring about the “terrible things” it made him want to do.
The obvious quibble is that these aren’t ‘too big to eat’, merely ‘too big to eat at one time’. This is like the ‘giant economy size’ packages of Stuff in grocery stores—businesses like to sell in what are to them profitable quantities, so they either give you a break on the price-per-component-unit or just make the minimum size from which they can profit into the minimum size that you can buy.