Email
Bliss Sandwich features The Mariah, a grilled chicken breast with applewood smoked bacon, avocado, red onion, lettuce, tomato, pesto and pepperjack cheese on a cornmeal-crusted bun. (Adolphe Pierre-Louis/Journal)
Locally owned. Local ingredients. Local purveyors. In Albuquerque restaurants, these phrases are said with ever-increasing frequency, yet none of us should ever be sick of hearing them – those words are always welcome in the sea of chain businesses.
Add to the list of locally oriented restaurants in town Bliss Sandwich Spot-N-More, a fitting replacement for the former Quiznos occupant, where you’ll find fresh breads, local chile and homemade potato salad all in one trip.
Tami Greenwald renovated the space simply, allowing most of the effort to stay with the ingredients and menu where it belongs – after all, this is no fine dining joint that needs tablecloths and servers but a sandwich spot.
She’s finding her place among the local lunch destinations by offering delivery on larger orders and stocking interesting sides like brewed kombucha tea. She tweaks options as necessary to serve customers’ needs while still keeping the doors open. Sunday brunch hours didn’t last, nor did the homemade marshmallows on the dessert list.
 |
||
|
Bliss Sandwich Spot-N-More LOCATION: 5010 Cutler NE, Suite D4 (at San Mateo), 888-9475, www.blisssandwich.com HOURS: 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays; closed Sundays NO ALCOHOL |
|
|
Breakfast begins at 8:30 – a bit late for office workers, perfect for the stay-at-home crowd – and features healthy items such as slow-cooked oatmeal and breakfast burritos with Wagner Farms chile.
Lunch branches out into more than a dozen items, none more beloved than the Green Chile Philly ($9.50) with a tangle of sliced beef, roasted peppers and flavorful yet mild chile. The standard formula comes “whiz wit,” which means a dollop of Cheez Whiz. You can sub another cheese if you like your cheese less gooey.
Any sandwich can be ordered on gluten-free bread at no extra charge, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless necessary. The bread is rendered soggy by any juicy filling even after a good toasting, falling apart with the barest of handling. Better yet to have toothsome bread, such as the baguette found in Le French Dip ($6.99), or the simple sourdough of Jiminy’s Criminy ($6.99), a vegetarian who’s who featuring mushrooms, onions, avocado, tomatoes and Swiss.
The bread-averse are better off having a Lake Louise ($8.99), Bliss’s heartiest salad done in the style of Cobb with bacon, egg, chicken, avocado and blue cheese. If you walk in with a good appetite, you’ll wish for a little bit more of each and every topping.
Albuquerque has been cultivating gourmet salad spots as of late, and while the offerings at Bliss are fine, they’re nothing revelatory. You can up the ante slightly beyond the standard in-house dressings by upgrading to a smoked olive oil vinaigrette for an additional 50 cents.
If sandwich shops are a normal destination in your lunch rotation, you know that many places take shortcuts on their sides, using re-portioned potato salad out of a bucket or serving soggy fries. Not so at Bliss, where the sweet potato fries ($1.99) are crispy and darkly craggy. The potato salad ($1.99) deserves a mention for its balance of flavors: crisp onions and creamy mayonnaise tossed with perfectly tender potato nuggets.
As Greenwald continues to tweak the “Bliss points,” this restaurant’s future looks bright.
