Anisha Holla
Audio By Carbonatix
Ultra-fluffy cream, crispy hand-breaded katsu and melt-in-your-mouth Japanese milk bread are just some of the items that made Sandoitchi stand out when it opened as a pop-up in 2020. It took three years, hundreds of long lines and 75,200 Instagram fans for Sandoitchi to finally land a brick-and-mortar spot next to the Joule Hotel in downtown Dallas.
Sandoitchi specializes in Japanese sandwiches called sandos, a style that calls for just about anything – cheese, katsu, fruit, egg salad – bound by two squares of fluffy white bread. It’s sliced with a crisp slit down the middle, yielding a satisfying cross-sectional view of all the clean-cut ingredients inside. Arranged symmetrically in cardboard boxes, the sandwich halves are great for take-out and are Instagram-ready.
The egg salad sando bursts with half-cooked yolk when bitten into.
Anisha Holla
Part of the fun is watching your meal being built behind the counter, which wasn’t an option back in the pop-up days. Now you can watch Sandoitchi’s signature milk bread being prepared in-house, as crusts are neatly trimmed off the sides at 90-degree angles and toppings are meticulously placed on top to ensure just the right proportion of bread-to-topping-to-cream. Sando-making here is an art. Strategically cut bread, intentionally placed toppings and pristine packaging are all essential ingredients in the preparation process.
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Sando varieties rotate weekly, which (dangerously) gives you a reason to come back every couple of days. A favorite is the egg salad sando ($10), which is stuffed with a scrambled egg salad. Soft-boiled eggs spill with a half-cooked yolk when bitten into. A strawberry cream sando is its sweeter sibling, stuffed with a light chantilly cream that almost melts against the pillow-like Japanese bread. Pockets of strawberry fruit catch the teeth mid-bite.
Order a spread of different sandos to sample.
Anisha Holla
Sandos also come toasted. Grilled milk bread is stuffed generously with ingredients like chicken katsu or poached lobster claws. We were drawn to the weekly special grilled cheese ($9), stuffed with a buttery blend of four different types of cheese.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the sandos here far outshine their competitors. Sandoitchi is the brainchild of former Uchi chef Stevie Nyugen, who spent years training in the art of Japanese cooking before launching his own pop-up. Years of professional chef-ing culminate in this simple yet exquisite treat of soft bread, fluffy cream and flavor-packed ingredients.
Wash it down with a glass (or two) of banana milk. It’s addicting.
Anisha Holla
Grab a glass of iced banana milk or matcha tea to accompany your meal on a hot day. Bags of exotic Japanese potato chips, in flavors like steak or Champagne, are stocked near the front for $3.50 each. But the chips and drinks are just supporting characters to the star-of-the-show sandos.
Sandoitchi will close in mid-September for a space remodel, so hurry over while you can. Keep tabs on the closing and reopening through the Instagram page. Parking tip: Free valet parking for one hour at the Joule Hotel.
Sandoitchi, 1604 Main St., No. 110. Thursday – Sunday, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
