“Andrew, what should I order today?”
“Chef, ya gotta get the meatball sub. We’re making those meatballs with pork, veal, beef and grinding in all of our Italian sandwich meat scraps. Salami, sopresetta, proscuitto. There’s some fresh herbs in there as well, put those meatballs on a few slices of provolone and we top it with tomato sauce and parmesan.”
I turned to Michelle Pavlakos, Andrew Fallis’s wife.
“Michelle! Andrew’s talking dirty to me.”
Michelle smiled and said to no one in particular, “Well today’s your lucky day.”
Harry’s Hoagies is as old school as a school can get, yet it’s only a few months old. Many years ago, before we industrialized our food system, small sandwich shops like Harry’s stood shoulder to shoulder in cities large and small. Pickles came in wooden barrels, meats were roasted in their own ovens, bread came from the neighborhood bakery, and the cheese was French, Italian or hailed from New York. If one wanted to open a sandwich shop today, why would you bother with sourcing individual ingredients when you could get it all from one large supplier? It’s much easier to call the Sysco representative.
Andrew and Michelle have done it the hard way. They order bread from a bakery in New Jersey, they make their own pickled vegetables, shave their own lettuce, grind their own pesto, make fresh potato salad, and of course they blend their own vinaigrettes, meatballs and tomato sauce.
“We wouldn’t have any other way.”
Much of what happens at Harry’s belies their fine-dining background. Watching the crew work is a thing of beauty as they dance back and forth from stove to slicer to cutting board.
Andrew and Michelle spent time at Charleston’s Peninsula Grill. There was a time, about 25 years ago, when Peninsula Grill created a breathtaking culinary magic and splendid hospitality. Its chef, Robert Carter, groomed many of today’s best chefs and restaurateurs in the South.
Although Harry’s is as diminutive as a restaurant can be, its food packs a powerful punch. More importantly, it’s all served with something that’s often missing in many of today’s modern restaurants: hospitality. There’s smiles, good afternoons, welcomes, is this your first times, how may I help yous, pleases, and thank-yous in abundance. At Harry’s Hoagies, longtime residents of Greenville may just see the ghost of the much-loved Little Pigs BBQ, the original one that for years sang its smoky siren song to BBQ aficionados from the Lake Forest shopping center. They’re of comparable size, offered the same level of dedication, charm and hospitality.
Harry’s is so much more than a sandwich shop. It’s a model of what a handful of dedicated culinarians can achieve with the humblest class of food, the sandwich.
John Malik is a restaurant coach and chef consultant in Greenville. He can be reached at chefjohnmalik@gmail.com.
