Frank Sinatra’s favourite sandwich
“I sang at social clubs and at roadhouses,” Frank Sinatra told his daughter Nancy, as quoted in the latter’s 1995 biography of her pops, Frank Sinatra: An American Legend. “Sometimes [I sang] for nothing or for a sandwich or cigarettes, all night for three packs. But I worked on one basic theory: Stay alive, get as much practice as you can.”
When we think of Sinatra today, we tend to think of tuxedoed American stardom at its glitziest and schmaltziest: Vegas, the Rat Pack, Ocean’s 11. It’s easy to forget that Francis Albert Sinatra grew up poor in Hoboken, New Jersey, and that he started his career in the middle of the Great Depression, singing, as he seemed proud to admit, for little more than some cigarettes or a sandwich. And what sandwich might that have been? How did a young Sinatra handle an empty tummy after a long night on stage? Or, better still, which sandwich would a rich, middle-aged Sinatra have had his personal chef rustle for him in the swinging ‘60s?
If you want to know this sort of information, there is no shortage of folks willing to give you an answer. If you want to know the truth, that’s going to be a tougher exercise. Believe it or not, claiming to know the favourite foods of dead celebrities is a long-running and quite fruitful industry all over the world, and while some of the world’s greasy spoons, delis, and diners really do try to do their due diligence and research the star-approved foods they peddle, it’s just as easy to cobble something together, say, something with a few Italian ingredients, and call it “The Sinatra Sandwich”.
According to some sources, Sinatra actually maintained a lot of the simpler tastes he’d been forced to develop back in his youth, often requesting an assortment of cold-cut meats backstage, or making himself a simple scrambled egg sandwich. His daughter seemed to back up the idea of the egg sandwich as a staple of Frank’s diet, describing one occasion when her dad had nearly drowned while filming a movie on the island of Kauai in 1964.
When he got back to his beach house to recover, “We went right back to the basics,” Nancy Sinatra wrote, “He said, ‘I’m hungry’. I said, ‘How about some peppers and eggs?’ He said, ‘OK’. We had pepper-and-egg sandwiches and watched TV together until he fell asleep.”
For professional, Sinatra-loving sandwich-makers hoping to honour their hero by crafting a signature Frank sandwich, however, putting some scrambled eggs on toast wasn’t going to feel like a suitable tribute to ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’. And so, at countless mom-and-pop shops all over America and further afield, there are variations of Sinatra’s favourite sandwich with no real adherence to any gospel, such as it were.
There was a famous version at a place called Garozzo’s Ristorante in Kansas City, which featured a giant hunk of Italian bread stuffed with a few different cheeses, ham, artichokes, and olives. “Yeah, it’s big,” an assistant chef at Garozzo’s proudly told a reporter in 1998, “Just like Sinatra”.
The day after Sinatra died in May 1998, there was a pilgrimage of fans from around the Kansas City area to Garozzo’s, with 27 Sinatra sandwiches sold before noon, and it’s doubtful whether any of them would have cared if someone had shown up and informed them that Frank actually preferred a scrambled egg sandwich. Sometimes, we are drawn to certain characters because of the mythology that grows around them, and while the reality is interesting, too, sometimes it can create inconveniences or mar the myth.
These days, you can see “Frank Sinatra’s favourite sandwich” being made on TikTok and Instagram just about every day by various chefs and deli owners, or by amateur kitchen-based influencers of all cuts and slices. Domenic’s Kitchen, as one prominent online example, makes a variety of novelty-themed sandwiches inspired by everything from Snoop Dogg to Stranger Things, with a viral video (2million views) depicting “Frank Sinatra’s Favourite Sandwich” as well, which feels more like imagining what Frank would look like as a sandwich.
Domenic doesn’t list his ingredients, but it’s basically veal Milanese with artichoke hearts and mozzarella on Italian bread, with inspiration for the veal coming from the knowledge that the singer would regularly order the dish from one of his favourite New York restaurants, Patsy’s. As for whether the Chairman of the Board ever actually proclaimed, for all to hear, what his all-time favourite combination of bread and fillings was, I’ll let the internet detectives do their best on that one.
