The 10 Best Sandwiches in America, Ranked

The burger list started fights. This one will start feuds. After years of eating, arguing, and cross-referencing, here is The Pass’s definitive ranking of the ten best classic sandwiches in America — the ones worth building a trip around. Our ranking, our rules.

10. R&O’s — Roast beef po’boy, Metairie, LA

The roast beef po’boy is New Orleans’ great debate, and R&O’s is where the traditionalists land. Slow-roasted beef, sliced thin, piled onto crisp French bread and drowned in debris gravy — the kind of sandwich that requires a strategy and a stack of napkins. Metairie locals treat it as a birthright. They’re right.

9. Salt Hank — French Dip, New York, NY

The French dip is a Los Angeles invention, but the best current argument for it lives in New York. Salt Hank’s version is built on prime rib — rosy, beefy, sliced to order — on a roll with enough structure to survive the dunk. The jus is the whole game: deep, peppery, impossible to waste. Order it, dip it, understand.

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8. Joe’s Kansas City — The Z-Man, Kansas City, KS

Barbecue between bread shouldn’t work this well. The Z-Man layers slow-smoked brisket with melted provolone and a tangle of crispy onion rings on a toasted kaiser roll — smoke, fat, crunch, and tang in every bite. It’s the sandwich that turned a gas station barbecue joint into a national pilgrimage site. Plan around the line.

7. Fred’s Meat & Bread — Korean Cheesesteak, Atlanta, GA

The best cheesesteak in Atlanta doesn’t come from a Philly transplant — it comes from a Korean-leaning sandwich shop in Krog Street Market. Fred’s Korean Cheesesteak starts with chopped ribeye seared on the flattop, draped in American cheese, then hit with gochujang sauce, spicy candied jalapeños, garlic aioli, and green onions on a sesame roll. Sweet, heat, funk, and beef — the remix that converts purists. The Michelin Guide agreed: this is a Bib Gourmand shop, and this is the sandwich to order.

6. Cali Sandwich Co — Combination banh mi, Houston, TX

Houston’s banh mi game is the best in America outside Vietnam, and Cali Sandwich Co in Midtown is the landmark. The combination — the Cali combo — layers cold cuts and rich pâté with pickled daikon and carrot, cucumber, jalapeño, and cilantro on a crackly baguette that’s shattering at the crust and pillowy inside. Tang, funk, heat, crunch — the best value sandwich in the country, and it’s not particularly close.

5. Turkey and the Wolf — Bologna sandwich, New Orleans, LA

A bologna sandwich has no business being this good. Turkey and the Wolf — Bon Appétit’s Best New Restaurant in 2017 — takes the humblest cold cut in the American canon and treats it like foie gras: thick-cut, seared, stacked with the works. It’s funny until you taste it. Then it’s just the standard by which all ironic-gourmet sandwiches get judged.

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4. Cochon Butcher — Muffuletta, New Orleans, LA

This is the muffuletta the city’s chefs eat. Cochon Butcher — Donald Link’s Warehouse District butcher shop — builds it with house-cured capicola, mortadella, and salami, layered thick with provolone on a 5-inch Gendusa’s sesame roll, each half slicked with house giardiniera: cauliflower, carrots, green olives, pepperoncini. The original was invented in 1906 for Sicilian dock workers; this is what that century-old idea tastes like when it gets the full charcuterie treatment.

3. Dalessandro’s — Cheesesteak, Philadelphia, PA

Philadelphia’s cheesesteak war has two famous combatants, and the connoisseurs’ money is on the Roxborough corner shop. Dalessandro’s chops its ribeye fine on the flattop, melts the cheese through the meat instead of on top of it, and packs it into a roll that holds. No gimmicks, no whiz debate required — just the most technically sound cheesesteak in the city that invented it.

2. Katz’s Delicatessen — Corned beef & pastrami, New York, NY

Since 1888, the temple. The move is the custom combo: corned beef and pastrami together, with Russian dressing, kraut, and mustard, on rye that exists mainly as a delivery system. The meat is the argument — pepper-crusted, hand-cut, steaming — and nearly a century and a half in, nobody has improved on it. Take the ticket, tip your cutter, find a table, be quiet for a while.

1. Parkway Bakery & Tavern — Oyster po’boy, New Orleans, LA

A century-old corner tavern, a basket of Gulf oysters fried to order, and the best fried-seafood sandwich on earth. The Parkway oyster po’boy is the platonic ideal: shatteringly crisp oysters, fully dressed with lettuce, tomato, pickle, and mayo on Leidenheimer French bread — the sweet, crackling loaf that makes every New Orleans po’boy possible and no other city’s sandwich quite the same. This is the one we’d cross the country for. This is the one we did.

What did we get wrong?

That’s the question we ask after every ranking, and we mean it. The sandwich canon is personal — your hometown deli, your gas-station po’boy, the Cuban your grandfather swore by. Tell us in the comments on Instagram: what did we miss, and what did we get wrong?