Little Geno’s Dublin
The Messy Ones Are Best
There is a book to be written about the sandwiches we eat when, as young, hungry, adventuresome people we are travelling and living abroad. Scott Holder, the creator of Little Geno’s Sandwich Deli in Dublin, is the man to write that book.
Scott’s voyages are memorialized by the sandwiches he encountered on his travels, a culinary GPS tracker recorded menu by menu, rather than by a mobile phone.
“I wanted to take these classic sandwiches from around the world and deliver them all under one roof, served exactly as you would get them in their place of origin,” he explains.
“For me food is all about the feeling it evokes, a memory or an emotion that transports us back to a time, to the feeling we had when we first tried that food.”
Little Geno’s sandwiches corral those feelings, memories and emotions, and place them between two slices of bread. Simply by taking a bite, we too are transported back in time to the place where those flavours first flipped our reward systems.
Take the Little Geno Bán Mhi, as an example. Holder retains the classic soft crusty roll as his base, but then adds his own house-made Vietnamese spiced pork sausage along with sliced pork belly, and fills the sub out with shredded carrot and daikon, sliced cucumber, before finishing with a black garlic aioli, some jalapeño vinaigrette, and some sparklingly crisp fronds of coriander.
The sandwich floods the senses with the warmth of lemongrass whilst also evoking the spice of a Chinese bun, delivering flavours with the power of a headlock. A moment ago you were sitting in a comfy seat on the edge of St Stephen’s Green, and now here you are in Hanoi.
It is thanks to Scott Holder’s meticulous attention to detail that these sensations are so quickly evoked. “We don’t mess with our sandwiches” they advise, so no substitutions are allowed to the roll-call of each classic production.
Taking you to the place is important, because sandwiches evolve in particular cities and places at particular times. As the chef Nick Brahman has written, describing America’s obsession with sarnies: “There’s a sandwich for nearly every major city: Chicago’s Italian beef, Philadelphia’s cheesesteak, Los Angeles’ French Dip. And in some cases there’s more than one: New York City boasts the chopped cheese and the many wonders of Ashkenazi Jewish delis: pastrami on rye, corned beef, cream cheese and lox bagels, while New Orleans boasts the muffaletta and several varieties of po’ boy.”
Holder has his own take on American standards. The Reuben, for example, brings us to “the first time I stepped into Katz’s Deli as a kid on a family holiday in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and tried to devour a Reuben bigger than my head. The energy and the hustle and bustle of that restaurant is something I'll never forget.”
He heads south for the brilliant Cubano to “sunny downtown Miami, and a sandwich epitomised so well by the great movie Chef, with Jon Favreau and John Leguizamo at the helm of a Cubano food truck driving across America telling the story of a chef on a comeback, inspired by LA chef Roy Choi.”
Sometimes, the sandwiches accompany Holder on his jaunts, so he takes his chicken parmigiana to Australia where it “becomes a local and familiar Australian staple where they add their affectionate Aussie charm, nicknaming it a chicken parmi.” The Geno’s version is a beauty: sweet, juicy and nicely messy because, as Holder says himself, “The messy ones are best!”
Scott describes his sandwiches as “an homage”, but there is nothing reverential or deferential in the way in which he radicalises the sandwiches to express his own perfectionism. If you know his Los Chicanos Mexican taco truck and the depthless dive into taco culture it created, you will find that same obsessiveness in Little Geno’s at Stephen’s Green, alive and kicking and ready to travel the globe.
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