There are sandwiches of circumstance. Spontaneous structures of brilliance built from last night’s dinner between two slices of bread, a bun or maybe a pita.
Then there are sandwiches of intention, culled from careful planning and procurement of just the right ingredients. Mario Llamas, owner and operator of Mario’s Butcher Shop in Orange County, is king of them all.
In the four years since he opened his butcher shop, in the corner of a dense strip mall in Newport Beach, he’s built a following for his house-cured and smoked meats and a growing menu of stellar sandwiches. Llamas cures and ages the coppa, soppressata and Genoa salami for the Italian sub. He smokes and steams his own pastrami.
After working as a chef in Guadalajara and Mexico City, he returned to the United States and started an apprenticeship at West Coast Prime Meats, one of the largest meat distribution companies in Southern California.
“I come from a steakhouse background and when chefs and cooks break down meat, it’s very different from when a butcher does it,” Llamas says. “I wanted to get into that. I didn’t even realize I was going to open a butcher shop.”
He spent 10 months working at West Coat Prime Meats, then the pandemic hit.
“I talked to a friend who knew that I love charcuterie,” he says. “I was making charcuterie in Mexico. He said why don’t you open a butcher shop and sandwich shop?”
Llamas originally planned to have a butcher shop that sold a few sandwiches. But after introducing people to his pastrami sandwiches, burgers and steak sandwiches, customers started asking for more.
His steak sandwich is a thing of beauty, modeled after the one an Argentine friend made at his sandwich shop in Guadalajara. When Mario’s first opened, Llamas made use of whatever cuts were left in his butcher case to make the sandwich. Demand quickly grew, and now Llamas exclusively sources filet mignon and New York strip steaks for the sandwich, sometimes going through 60 pounds of meat a day.
He cooks his steaks over charcoal, throwing in a few logs of white oak for the slightly sweet and smoky flavor. Imagine the centerpiece of a steakhouse table, the sort of perfectly marbled, unctuous steak you’d reserve for special occasions. Llamas is taking that steak and turning it into your paper-wrapped lunch.
“That’s my jam,” he says. “I love grilled meats and Argentinian food.”
Once the steak is sheathed in a mahogany crust and pink in the middle, he slices and piles the meat onto a roll from Bread Artisan Bakery in Santa Ana, where Llamas sources all of his bread and buns. He adds lettuce and tomato, and hits both sides of the roll with Kewpie mayonnaise.
“The Kewpie with the red top,” he says. “That’s the one with the MSG.”
He crowns the sandwich with a chimichurri he developed while working at an Argentine restaurant in Guadalajara. The meat juices mingle with the Kewpie and chimichurri for maximum lubrication. It’s a sandwich that delivers total elation.
Earlier this year, he expanded the operation with a commissary kitchen nearby, and he took over the optometry office next door to build out a larger kitchen and storefront for the butcher shop. Now, he’s serving upward of 20 different sandwiches and burgers, there’s a longer butcher case and refrigerated section with fresh pastas, sauces and other grab-and-go items. Soon, he’ll have rotisserie chickens.
Llamas’ sandwich lineup is a merging of his childhood favorites and the sandwiches he fell in love with in Mexico.
The mortadella is an exemplar of the chef’s meticulous dedication to the art of making sandwiches.
“Less is more is definitely true when it comes to a sandwich,” he says.
Llamas starts with a crusty roll, slathering both sides with a generous amount of Kewpie mayonnaise. He adds a bed of fresh spinach to the bottom, then tightly rolls the mortadella into cylinders, adding both height and air to the sandwich. He drapes a slice of provolone cheese over the top.
“If we just laid the mortadella flat, the sandwich would be flat like a pancake,” he says. “The roll creates air so when you bite it, it’s airy instead of flat.”
The crusty bread collapses into the mayonnaise, cheese and what could be two inches of mortadella. The cylindrical shape of the meat allows the mellow, fatty pork to really sing. Then the spinach arrives with another wave of texture and a burst of freshness.
The sandwich that always leaves me a little dumbstruck is the smoked bologna. It’s a meat you either find an affinity for in childhood, or one you shun out of unfamiliarity, or maybe even disgust.
“We’re Mexican and my mom would make beans and stuff like that, but I went to my friend’s house one day and he had bologna,” he says. “His mom would fry it up in a sauce pan and serve it on white bread with mayo. I was like, Mom, can you buy bologna, too?”
Llamas smokes his bologna with white oak and apple wood for about two hours. He claps the smoked beef into the center of a toasted, spongy bun with a jolt of yellow mustard, some Kewpie mayonnaise and thick slices of raw white onion. It’s the sandwich that turned me into a bologna believer.
With one holiday behind us, and more fast approaching, I asked Llamas to share his leftover sandwich tips. He had many.
For any stray slices of turkey, he suggests making a Cubano of sorts, assuming your holiday spread might also include a spiral of ham.
“Heat up the turkey and ham and get some nice toasty bread and mustard, pickles, and you got to have Swiss cheese,” he says. “Hopefully you have a panini press so you can press it all together. That’s the perfect after-Thanksgiving sandwich.”
If you’re serving prime rib, make a prime rib dip.
“Get some crusty bread for sure, like thick slices, not thin,” Llamas says. “Hopefully you have some horseradish cream. Slice the prime rib as thin as possible. And hopefully you have some au jus. Heat up the meat in that, put it on the sandwich and add a little Swiss cheese.”
And don’t skimp on the mayonnaise. It’s the one ingredient Llamas believes should and could belong on any sandwich. But his most important advice is to keep it simple. There’s no need to pile every leftover on the table into a single sandwich.
“Try to make a sandwich with only four ingredients,” he says. “If you can do it with four, that’s perfect.”
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