Welcome to a new feature on our blog called 100 Favorite Dishes, where we countdown, um, 100 of our favorite dishes. That's right, starting now and for every day for the next 100 (week)days we will rehash all our favorite dishes. Simple as that. And if we did the math right, it should end at exactly the time that our annual Best Of Issue comes out. See what we did there? Genius, if we do say so ourselves.
So here goes, #100.
#100. Jerk Carnitas Torta at The Crosby
It starts with the butter-soaked bun. You want it like this, practically sweating grease, heated on a griddle till the edges toast to a crispy brown. Then on goes piles of shredded roasted pork.
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Aron Habiger of The Crosby calls the sandwich a torta–a nod to the torta bread and also the neighborhood where his hip bookstore-restaurant-lounge is located–but it is, above all, just a really great pulled pork sandwich.
Culled from a patchwork of places, the sandwich uses pork seasoned with Jamaican jerk and a cilantro serrano aoili with an obvious Mexican influence (and yes that is a swipe of Sriracha on the plate). But it's the housemade pickled onions that make it. This not-too-tart, spicy and sweet add-on proves that a simple ingredient can do amazing things to an already amazing sandwich.
The Crosby, 400 N Broadway, Santa Ana, CA 92701, (714) 543-3543, www.thisisthecrosby.com
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.