Food Diary 5/14

The Funny Bar Tuna Melt

In 2015, Bon Appétit declared the tuna melt “The World’s Most Polarizing Sandwich.” Senior staff simply couldn't agree: Was it a great guilty treat? Or a crime against all that was culinary? “A tuna melt definitely falls within my top three favorite sandwiches of all time,” said the assistant to the editor-in-chief. “LITERALLY makes me gag just thinking about it,” said the editor-in-chief.

My family, though less expert, is divided too. “I love a tuna melt. It’s my favorite sandwich.” That’s my mom. “Can’t stand them. They make me sort of nauseous.” That’s my brother, Simon. This must have been a burden for him given that I recall eating them pretty often as a kid, maybe once a week, always on english muffins, always broiled, open face, two at a time. I’d come home, say “Mom, I’m hungry,” and she’d say something like: “It’s not dinner time,” and then she’d make me a tuna melt. It’s a fairly balanced hot meal you can make in five minutes.

Funny Bar in the Lower East Side is probably the most notable New York nightlife spot to open in the last couple years. It’s packed, it’s all over Twitter, you see famous people pass through. There’s three reasons for this. First of all, it’s huge—large like the clubs in movies—with a bar, a dining room, and a lower level for private parties. It’s also upscale. There’s white tables, lots of leather, candlelight, jazz. But that presentation is a kind of high camp. There’s a winking aspect to Funny Bar too. The tablecloth is paper. You draw on it with crayons. And the clientele is mixed—slick professionals from the West Village and rumpled artists from Brooklyn. It both is an upscale bar and restaurant, and—especially late at night—can be a pretty ironic place.

Another sort-of joke is the food. Funny Bar has a very limited menu: steak, salad (iceberg wedge), a rotating vegetable, and a few sides. They don’t ask you how you want your steak cooked. It just comes out medium-rare. Normally, a tiny menu speaks to a sort of impossible seriousness. At Funny Bar, it’s meant to be funny—a very serious deadpan joke. Now they’ve added another menu item. Which both should be taken pretty seriously and is meant to be funny. Welcome to the Funny Bar Tuna Melt.

“It’s a diner thing,” says head chef Raphael Wolf. “But it goes just as well with a martini as with a cup of coffee.” It’s also a nostalgic food for him. “There was a lunch counter near where I grew up run by one guy. You’d order a tuna melt and he’d open the can and make it fresh in front of you.” He pauses. “It was terrible.” Funny Bar plans to do better.

Wolf’s vision for the tuna melt is French-inspired, instead of celery, red onion, pickle, he’s using more of a tartare approach: shallot, dijon mustard, capers, olive oil, egg yolk. Instead of a dill spear on the side (or bread and butter pickles under the cheese like my mom does it), a cornichon is planted by toothpick. A flag, announcing the conquest of good taste.

A discussion ensues while I’m enjoying my melt. It centers around the greasiness of open-faced sandwiches. “I think you have to do closed,” says Funny Bar manager Ava Schwartz. “I’m not doing it,” says Wolf. “It’s not a grilled cheese with tuna.” I too prefer open-faced. My mom made it that way. Also the cheese won’t melt the same with a slice of bread on top of it. Pizza is greasy too. Would you have a closed face pizza?

I’m told of many such considerations in the development of the Funny Bar tuna melt. Rival sandwiches were tried at Golden Diner, S&P Lunch, and B&H Dairy. (I’ve had the B&H one, challah and American cheese—not good.) Breads were tested—rye, sourdough, baguette, croissant. The croissant was delicious, but ultimately rejected: “It feels non-Jewish somehow,” Wolf tells me. When I visited, I tried two variations—one with yellow cheddar, one with swiss, both on sourdough (the final version is served on a baguette). The cheddar was a bit loud, a bit diner-y for the more subtle tartare ingredients, whereas the milder swiss—too muted for a cheeseburger—let the tangy, more unusual tuna salad stand out.

Overall, the sandwich is impressive. The tuna salad wasn’t hot—the primary source of anti-melt sentiment. The cheese was the right balance of gooey and crisp, which is very hard to do without ruining the tuna. Haters who refuse to eat tuna melts might still refuse to eat it. But they’ll be wrong to. Because there is just something very right about eating an artisanal tuna melt in a bar The New York Times has described as “Lynchian.” This is the perfect time to win any lingering tuna melt arguments you have. Bring your boss. Bring your brother. Show them all.

At $15.95, Funny Bar will be serving seven tuna melts a night, so come early-ish. A martini pairing is recommended. If you’re on a date, get a fernet digestif too.

Below is a tuna melt of my own. The only tartare ingredient I had was the egg yolk. Mine was worse. The tuna was hot. The bread was wrong. It was still pretty good.