Same question. Memphis is great for trying out some rarified southern cooking, but the food isn't mind exploding.

So, what's happening here is a bunch of sandwiches are falling down to more known food. Maybe PB&J and McRib should have made it into this battle. It's actually getting harder to believe grilled cheese didn't advance.

In Memphis, in no particular order (and all quite different imo):
Rendezvous
Central BBQ
The BBQ Shop
Neely's/Interstate BBQ
Leonard's--a step down from the above but can sometimes still be good

Reaching farther afield:
Abe's--Clarksdale MS. My favorite bbq sandwiches OAT.
McClard's--Hot Springs AR
Dreamland BBQ--several locations, but the original in Tuscaloosa AL is special.

Others good ones have come and gone in that region over the decades, but all of these have endured. And for good reason.

Its entirely possible I went to some tourist trap spot when I was in Memphis but its also possible that you went to a tourist spot BBQ in Texas.

If we're just comparing pulled pork, sauces aside, I prefer southern carolina style because the pork is done whole hog style. There's less smoke, I will grant you that, but the pork is super tender, reminiscent of a Hawaiian Kalua Pork or a Balinese Babi Guling. Top it off with a whole piece of crackling or to have some crackling chopped and mixed in, damn thats good eating.

I had Rendezvous and Leonard's. It was good but again, nothing that blew my mind away. Could have been an off day.

Again, I want to emphasize that there is some degree of personal preferences here but when you draw so many arrows in your BBQ hierarchy and be so definitive about it, then I have to call your opinion in to question.

Of course it is opinion. Aren't all tastes?

I lived in TX for a while and have been there numerous other times, so I certainly wandered into some non-tourist traps, including some downright "joints", which btw are my favorite bbq "restaurants." I have a strong preference for pork bbq over beef bbq. Doesn't make it right or wrong--except in my opinion.

Do you even OOT? Of course it matters and on this occasion you happen to be right. Barbequed piggy

Damn, you do some travelling. I was in the delta for a short bit. I didn't stick around enough or travel enough to really form an opinion of all the food. Lots of locally grown and hand made food, that's for sure.

Well? Grilled cheese (or variations of it) is the best sandwich ever. I voted breakfast sandwich because the way I make them are basically grilled cheese with eggs and bacon or sausage added.

The results so far are showing the two major problems with the methodology behind the voting process:

1. Allowing people who have not had all of the sandwiches to vote. Banh Mi is taking a huge beating here due to grilled cheese voters spite voting for the closest thing they know.

2. The erroneous voting criteria. "Select it based on the best reasonably available version of that sandwich to you." is problematic for numerous reasons, but again Banh Mi suffers geographic discrimination here from the randoms who live in lol Middle America and have never seen a non white person in real life other than that one exchange student a few years ago.

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ED is of course 100% wrong about Banh Mi not being photogenic, and is handicapped by his inability to take or appreciate solid food photos.



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Correct BBQ rankings:
1. NC
2. SC
3. TN
4. KC
58418424155. TX

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Correct voting for this round should be:

Pulled Pork
Banh Mi
Cheesesteak (incorrectly bracketed against Banh Mi, should be defeating Brisket)
Pastrami

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In conclusion, lolOOT.

I just moved to Raleigh and the only Vietnamese place to get a Vietnamese sandwich is at pho restaurants and one food truck that seems to be only open a couple of days per week. I imagine it is like this in most places.

I moved from Denver and it looks like there are a few places there but I would have never noticed unless I searched for it.

I will admit I have never had (nor even heard of) Bahn Mi before this contest. And looking at that picture? I would have to be paid to eat that thing as it looks awful. Different people do have different tastes. One mans heaven is another mans hell

I can’t believe so many people know where they can go out and get a good brisket sandwich where they live. I can not remember ever seeing it on a menu.

Also, brisket is a cheap inferior meat. It takes a real life wizard to make it into something that tastes good. If I remember correctly, a lot of people make it sweet somehow. For every place that actually has good brisket, there are at least 10 that suck.

I grew up in the Carolinas and ate a lot of BBQ in both. But there's so much bbq and so much variety that I think mostly people are experts in what they've eaten.

A+ ... S. Carolina--mustard-based sauces, a holdover from german immigrants, pulled pork only ... Can't even name a place, I ate so much of it growing up. Just not the racist mofo downtown.
A++ ... N. Carolina--vinegar-based, a wider range of pork cuts, still mostly known for pulled pork... Allen & Sons, around Chapel Hill, is awesome.
A+ ... Memphis--I just remember sauce and smoked meat.
A++ ... Kansas City I ate it all and it was all wonderful
A+++ ... Texas. Texans do their bbq right and well and good and it is the best.

I ate in a bunch of BBQ joints travelling a few years back, but Texas was really something else. And not just LA BBQ, which is in a trendy hipster area .... it was fantastic, but so were the roadside places doing goat

Texas BBQ may well be a different subset of BBQ.

Having grown up with saucy-pulled pork sandwiches, I can firmly say less sauce and more good meat is the way to go. NC makes really really good pulled pork. Maybe the best.

But it's BBQ. As long as there's some effort and real ingredients in it, I'll probably love it.

I lived in Memphis a long time and never went to Leonard’s. Rendezvous is pretty overrated tourist trap bbq.

My favs are Germantown commissary and central bbq. I also like bbq shop.

Corkys is also trash. Tops is trash

So google is telling me bahn mi is vietnamese for bread, but that's about it(specifically, baguette). Is there a typical list of fillings you'd use to qualify something as a "bahn mi"? I don't even recall seeing them in Vietnam, but in the sandwich's defence I was drunk a lot of the time there.

There's a pretty good diagram with typical ingredients up this page, I think, or on #2 ....

An ex was from Vietnam, and when we'd visit her family in OKC we would always go out for pho and bahn mi. I'd eat and think "this is the most amazing sandwich/bowl ever!" but they were far more critical.

I'm sure they are all different but this is a good example .... I did not know about the pork roll in the mix, actually.

A lot of the amazingness of the bahn mi comes from the mix of flavors and textures. Crunch and soft, vinegary v rich .... the cheese steak, which is kind of one-flavor-ish (though still awesome), is kind of the bahn mi's opposite.

Breakfast sandwich has a built-in advantage because it generally doesn't have sandwich competition in daily life (ignoring the times they're had for lunch/dinner) and is therefore a staple.

Basics are hot or cold pork, carrot, cilanto, cucumber, pate. Cold cuts vary wildly but good ones usually include head cheese or something like it. Up here you also get butter sometimes and sriracha "You like it spicy?!".

Breakfast sandwich, also seems, too broad of a term.

Cucumbers are not good. They should change the sandwich to reflect this fact, then maybe it would win a contest.

I pretty much dislike every single ingredient other than pork and even then it depends on how the pork is presented.

As a recent convert to the banh mi, I find its demise distressing.

What we are seeing here is the divide between the urban elitists and the common clay everyman (person).

Blue eats banh mi and looks down its nose at Joe Sixpack (red) who likes breakfast sandwich and cheese steak.

Depends which side gets out the vote. Which is how you swing from Obama to Trump.

The Blues should quit rolling their eyes and get their people to vote banh mi.

(my banh mi experience is limited to the little pre-mades at Bay 101 which are fine but nothing to rave about)

Half of these are just ___-prepared meat slapped on a roll/bread. While they qualify as sandwiches, there is no nuance, precision, or flavor other than the meat. Pastrami sandwich? Pulled pork? Brisket? Cheese steak? All fine meats on bread. Some are arguably more delicious without the bread, which really shows how unsandwichy they are. They belong in a meats competition, as the thread has turned into. The others are real sandwiches that offer a much richer sandwich experience.

Take banh mi, in which the meat is delicious, but only a small part of the overall experience. The bread is always great, and the other ingredients make for a kaleidoscopic flavor profile. Or the reuben, where the bread is specified, the preparation is specified, and the ingredients again provide a level of interest far greater than the meats-on-breads genre. Even the lowly BLT has more of an interesting construction, especially the club version cut into triangles.