Description
A lovely loaf cradles the sausage sandwiches at Wild Goose Tavern. It’s big and pillowy, thicker than the average hot dog bun, and when you bite into the chewy, slightly yeasty roll, you realize you’re eating real bread—something designed for this very purpose and with a substantial crust impermeable to liquids. This isn’t the stuff you buy in bulk for Fourth of July, but a custom-crafted piece produced by Dean Kim at OC Baking Company that’s similar to those used to make proper Maine lobster rolls. The sausages wedged into them are also of enviable pedigree. Some are said to have come from Mattern Sausage in Orange. But it’s here, in this bar, that this bread and these tube steaks become one and become great. It’s advisable to double up on the napkins for the “Chicken Mole” sausage. Garlic aioli is smeared; sugar-sweet cubed beet relish is spooned into the crevasse of the bread; squirts of Sriracha are zigzaged all over disregarding any boundaries; and the barely set yolk of a sunny-side-up quail egg is destined to burst. You approach the thing trying to determine whether it’s better if you knife-and-fork it. But this is a sandwich, after all, so you open your mouth wider than you thought possible to receive it. As you eat, the back of your throat burns from the latent spiciness of the sausage while your upper lip glistens with grease and throbs from direct contact with the Sriracha.
