The New Yorker:

Farley’s, in Bed-Stuy, lavishes attention on an unsung icon of Americana cooking.

By Helen Rosner

Few words in the English language have the onomatopoeic satisfaction of “slop.” Its opening consonants evoke sludge and slipperiness, the round “O” and smacking “P” the liquid wallop of a viscous substance hitting a surface at speed. Pigs eat slop. Clogged sinks overflow with it. A.I. engines generate it. It’s not a term of charm or refinement, yet at Farley’s, a new counter-service restaurant in Bed-Stuy specializing in sloppy-joe sandwiches, it takes on a mantle of respect, even reverence. “Do you want the slop on the sandwich?” you might be asked, on ordering lunch to go. The alternative is to have the slop portioned out into a takeout soup container, and the sandwich bun packaged separately—when you’re ready to sit down and eat, you can do the slopping yourself. If you waffle on your order—torn, say, between a traditional sandwich and the menu’s several innovative ones—you might be praised for finally making your pick with a phrase possibly never uttered before the opening of this restaurant: “That’s a good slop.”

The sloppy joe is an unsung icon of Americana cooking, several rungs down the ladder of respectability from its more celebrated quick-serve cousins, such as the hamburger and the chili dog. The sandwich, featuring ground meat—generally beef—suspended in a thick, sweet tomatoey sauce, has become an avatar of the horrible school lunch, a cliché that tends to go along with hairnets, greasy aprons, and other elements of canteen grotesquerie. “I know how yous kids like ’em sloppy!” a wild-eyed lunch lady in “Billy Madison,” Adam Sandler’s 1995 satire of the idiocy of lower education, cries. This is, of course, a tremendously unfair characterization of the lunch lady, who, given her profession of feeding hungry children, ought to be stereotyped as saintly rather than monstrous. It’s also unfair to the sloppy joe, which even in its most slapdash form is a genuinely delicious construction. My own school-cafeteria memories are mostly of cartilaginous chicken sandwiches, microwaved to tepid inside their individually sealed plastic wrappers. A sloppy joe, slopped to order, even perfunctorily, would’ve been a fantastical treat.

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