It has all the qualities of classic comfort food: a steaming mug of sweet tomato soup served with a sandwich of melting cheese inside slices of golden buttery toast. Moms have been presenting grilled cheese sandwiches to happy children for decades.
Once relegated to kitchen tables, school cafeterias, lunch counters, and diners, this satisfying combo is making a comeback in popular culture and high-end restaurants, and is poised to become the new mac and cheese. Slices of processed cheese and ordinary white bread have been replaced by farmstead favorites and chewy or rich loaves. The top lunchtime seller at Woodward in the Ames Hotel consists of thick brioche, comté and Gruyere cheeses, tomato, and applewood smoked bacon. For dipping or slurping there’s a side of fresh tomato soup. “The brioche sops it up nicely,’’ says executive chef Mark Goldberg. At the gastropub Garden at the Cellar, Iggy’s dense pullman is grilled with Vermont cheddar, and at Restaurant Dante, every Tuesday night you can order a different $2 grilled Italian-inspired cheese sandwich. Owner Dante de Magistris says, “I love all types of food, but crunchy bread and oozy cheese is crazy satisfying.’’
Rick Katz sees a similar response. At Picco, diners indulge in Clear Flour’s sourdough bread slathered with a five-cheese mornay sauce, filled with cheddar and brushed with butter. “We offer more interesting panini,’’ says the South End restaurateur, “but none sell as well as grilled cheese.’’
Some say that the young renegade chefs of the last decade who wanted to stamp a menu with their own imprint brought the old-fashioned dish back in the limelight. Others credit celebrity chef Thomas Keller. In 1999, he described a grilled farmhouse cheddar and Early Girl tomato consomme in “The French Laundry Cookbook.’’ He describes it as “a dish straight out of American childhood, refined into haute cuisine.’’
If Keller is indeed the source of the updated classic, he’s spawned a host of food trucks and eateries across the country. San Francisco residents Tiffany Lam and Alex Rando operate a weekly street cart they call Toasty Melts, which offers seven variations and notifies customers of their whereabouts via Twitter (the most popular is ABC — apple, bacon, and cheddar). Instead of soup, Lam makes tomato sauce, which patrons use for dipping. Ohio is home to both Tom + Chee (a booth in Cincinnati’s Fountain Square) and Melt Bar & Grilled in Cleveland, where a tattoo of the restaurant’s grilled cheese logo earns patrons a 25 percent discount for life. Portland, Ore., has the Grilled Cheese Grill, a food stand where patrons dine at picnic tables or in a school bus. In Los Angeles, you can find the Grilled Cheese Truck, where hot weather calls for tomato soup shooters instead of soup in mugs.
All are playing to an audience primed to enjoy the duo. Americans consume an estimated 2 billion grilled cheese sandwiches every year, often with a serving of tomato soup. In its most iconic form, it is simply two slices of white bread, one slice of American cheese, a pat of butter, and a can of Campbell’s condensed tomato soup thinned with milk or water.
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