Get this guy into a conversation about his eatery’s new menu and he starts saying things like, “You have to care for the bread.”
So, don’t smush it, right?
“Oh, there’s soooo much more to it than that,” insists Belmont Brewerks owner Rick Veon. “You have to love the bread.”
Love the bread?
“Yes, love the bread.”
So, don’t squeeze it?”
“Not until it’s the vessel.”
The vessel?
“That delivers.”
Delivers?
“Yes, delivers.”
We’re still talking about sandwiches, right?
“We are.”
Sandwiches that deliver?
“They’d better.”
Five Kinds
Three-hundred-ninety-six divided by five equals almost 80 and dividing 80 by nine comes out to about nine sandwiches served at the Martins Ferry restaurant per hour that Brewerks was open during the first week the five new sandwiches were on a special menu.
Those numbers exceeded what Veon had projected when he and his kitchen crew developed the new eatery options. Veon, a Wheeling native graduated by The Linsly School in 1986, compiled more than 30 years’ experience in the food service industry before returning home to the Upper Ohio Valley in 2020.
“I’ll be honest, I did forget about the meat-and-potato mentality here in the valley. It was true when I was a kid and it’s still true today,” Veon explained. “Since high school, I’ve lived in a lot of different places so I was introduced to a little of everything along the way. It’s really amazing how people have their favorite foods in different places in the country and how you get used to them after you move into the area.
“But when I came home and started going out to eat once everything opened up again, I was very quickly reminded about the meat and the potatoes here in the Wheeling area,” he said. “It’s not that I thought it would be different these days, it’s just that I had forgotten what my favorites were when I was in high school. That was a few years ago.”
These days, though, he and his wife Heather operate Brewerks on Fourth Street in Martins Ferry and since the purchase in June, Veon has tweaked the restaurant’s menu. It was mind-July, in fact, when he decided to introduce five new sandwiches.
“The new sandwiches on the menu are blowing away everything else we have on the menu. The Club is the most popular, but then the Cuban, the Brewben, the Pot Roast, and the Killer Grilled Cheese follow, and they’ve all done better than we expected,” Veon reported. “The first week we had those on the menu, we sold almost 400 sandwiches. Our kitchen crew did a fantastic job.
“Our soups go very well with all of our sandwiches, and those soups will change pretty often now that we’re getting close to the cooler months,” he explained. “I know one of my favorite lunches is our Killer Grilled Cheese and our soup of the day, and I’m sure it’ll be a popular combination when we get into October, November, and December.”
Top to Bottom
Step One: Take care of the bread.
Step Two: Acknowledge the strongest ingredient/flavor.
Step Three: Use quality meats, cheese, vegetables.
“It’s all about the build and the consistency on everything on it. Of course, it starts with the bread and whether or not you are toasting it or grilling it,” Veon explained. “On my sandwiches the mayo is always on top and the mustard is always on the bottom. The mustard is the most powerful flavor on the sandwich so it has to be last in the flavor profile.
“Now, some of this might sound ridiculous to some people, but the way you place the lettuce, the tomato, the onion … it all matters,” he insisted. “But it’s about how you want that sandwich to taste all of the way through. Put it this way. If it was a T-B-L, you would get a completely different flavor than a B-L-T.”
Think about that.
If, instead of a Bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich, it was a tomato-bacon-lettuce, it would taste differently?
“Most definitely.”
But why?
“It’s all about your palate and the order it receives the flavors.”
It is?
“It is.”
Interesting.
“Hey, I don‘t make the rules.”
That’s when Veon returned to the topic of bread.
“That’s because the kind of bread you use for any sandwich is super important. It is the vessel of the sandwich,” the entrepreneur said. “The bread, in many respects, is the end-all, be-all. No matter what, you have to take care of those two pieces of bread because it’s going to be the vessel that takes care of the rest of the sandwich. That’s a known fact.
“The majority of the breads we use at Brewerks come out of several places in Pittsburgh. It just depends on what kind of bread it is,” Veon added. “We have all of the basic breads for the sandwiches, but we have others for other menu items, too.”
Because bread is THAT important?
“Again, I don’t make the rules,” Veon said with a smile. “I follow them, though, and that makes people very, very happy.”
