The Sloppy Joe Makes a Kicky Comeback

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.

The sandwich’s reputation has been rehabilitated of late, in fits and starts. There’s a solid, mega-meaty take at the mini-chain Schnipper’s; a terrific vegan version that used to be on the menu at Superiority Burger could have converted even the most skeptical snob or carnivore. But Farley’s, with an all-slop menu and retro stylings, makes the most impassioned argument yet for the sloppy joe’s reconsideration. There are seven types of slop (developed by the restaurant’s co-owners, Samuel Saverance and Matt Buentello, in consultation with the chef Fred Hua), all of them built atop the foundational “mother” sauce of the traditional sloppy joe. The Original Joe—sauce, meat; classic—is a little tangy, the mixture tinted by Worcestershire and noticeably celery-forward. It is good, but not necessarily the sloppy joe of my dreams. Things get more exciting when you sample the variations. The Cubano Joe contains cubed ham mixed in with the slop, along with pickles, Swiss cheese, and yellow mustard. The Cajun Joe embellishes a standard slop with shrimp and chopped andouille sausage, creating something like an étouffée on a roll. The Mekong Joe—my favorite by a mile, and one of the most exciting sandwiches I’ve had this year—is a glorious mishmash of Southeast Asian elements, including aromatic fish sauce, spicy bird’s-eye chiles, bright Thai red curry, and a voluptuous backdrop of coconut; crabmeat mixed into the slop lends an extra funky note.