216 Broadway E, 860-6858
8 am-midnight every day.
We each of us have our perfect foods. I know someone who would as soon eat a whole avocado for lunch as anything else. My own perfect food is the grilled cheese sandwich, and yet it is very hard to find--here, with our dearth of Greek coffee shops--in its platonic form.
Perfect grilled cheese is buttery. All the sleek, expensive panini machines in the world can't make grilled cheese sing unless the bread is buttered on the outside. This gives grilled cheese its signature crisp sweetness, a wholeness--bread bridging two dairy moments--that takes it above the realm of a mere melt. Perfect grilled cheese is judiciously filled; there is a time and a place for bacon and tomato, to be sure, but a raft of vegetables covered in unevenly melted cheese is not grilled cheese.
Perfect grilled cheese is not overflowing with cheese, and it is not served on mile-high artisan bread, but is as dainty as a finger sandwich. There is much disagreement about ingredients, which I feel stems from a certain embarrassment about American cheese, which is, perhaps inadvertently, the best cheese for grilled cheese. White bread is best, although a good sour rye has its charms.
All of this having been said, the grilled cheese sandwich ($4.90) at the Capitol Hill Cafe is... pretty darn good. The rye bread was slightly too thick, a bit too much cheese (a nice mild cheddar) flowed out from between the slices, and it was definitely not buttery. But those folks obviously respect the perfect object that a grilled cheese sandwich is, and serve it--neatly toasty, perfectly melted--with nothing but a sour, garlicky pickle.