A creatively crunchy take on a sandwich has become so popular that it’s gone viral multiple times over the past few years. On July 9, caught up with Long Island eatery , which has seen a recent surge in business thanks to a relatively recent menu addition: the pickle sandwich. The briney dish, which takes deli meat, cheese, bacon and other toppings and sandwiches it between halves of a hefty, scooped-out pickle, has people driving hours and forming lines out the door to try it.
“This is super, super weird,” Anthony Fiorito, owner of Seven Brothers, told NBC New York. “It literally feels like a dream.” The sandwich was first made in January at the Oceanside, New York shop by employee Stephanie Kempf, who has since become Seven Brothers’ social media manager.
She says she and coworker Gianna Cilluffo came up with the idea together. “We were working one day and we both love the pickles that we serve,” Kempf tells TODAY.com.
“We just said, ‘Hey, let’s just put honey turkey on a pickle and make it a sandwich.’” The sandwich was early in the year, but the sister of an employee is to thank for the menu item’s virality a few months later. In early May, a went viral, garnering more than 4 million views and drawing customers to the shop’s door.
“The next day came, ‘Oh, wow, we made 20, we made 30,’ and it was like, ‘We need 70,’” Fiorito told NBC New York. “Then I’m calling the board’s head guy directly like ‘I need more pails of pickle.