Supreme sandwiches

The greatest may be the one with pastrami

- PETE WELLS

A worker slices pastrami at Frankel's Delicatessen. A pastrami, egg and cheese breakfast sandwich is prepared at Frankel's Delicatessen in Brooklyn, NYC, on Nov 3.

Like any New Yorker, I look pretty self-assured when I'm inside the bodega waiting to give my breakfast order. But until I've got my coffee and sandwich in hand, I'm as vulnerable as I'd be wearing nothing but a hospital robe.

Which is why, on the day that the counter guy told me he couldn't make me a bacon, egg and cheese because he was out of bacon, I just stared at him with my mouth open. And why I began sucking air in short, ragged breaths when he suggested that he could make the sandwich with turkey bacon instead.

But New Yorkers are survival artists, and by instinct I was searching for a way out. I soon found the answer, right behind the curved glass of the deli case. Pastrami.

My modest hope was that pastrami would make a plausible stand-in for bacon just this one time so I could get on with my day. What I discovered is that pastrami is better than bacon. Although, taste being subjective and context being everything, it would be more accurate to say that I like it better than bacon in the specific setting of a breakfast sandwich whipped up quickly and double-wrapped in wax paper and foil by the nearest bodega or deli.

A few years ago, I called the BEC, or bacon-egg-and-cheese on a roll, "the classic and possibly highest formulation" of the bodega breakfast sandwich. Classic it remains, but I no longer think of it as the apogee of the form.