Location: 16 Trinity Street, Toronto
Website: https://billysbodega.com/

As soon as I saw photos of the smoked meat sandwich at Billy’s Bodega, I was in.  House-made, hand-cut smoked meat?  Yes please, I want that, where is it?

They actually have two smoked meat sandwiches on the menu.  There’s the Little Billy, which comes with 150 grams of meat and costs $19, and the Big Billy, which comes with 300 grams and costs $29.

I went with the Little Billy.  I had no idea what 150 grams of meat looked like, but based on the price, I figured this would be a decent amount of meat.  It turns out 150 grams isn’t much meat!  I don’t know if you get a sense of the scale from the photo, but I probably could have eaten each half of the sandwich in about two bites.

Lesson learned: splurge and get the Big Billy.

The quality of the meat is quite nice.  It’s thickly sliced, it’s got a good amount of perfectly rendered fat, and it’s very tender.  The texture is exactly where you want it to be.  It’s stellar.

The flavour is a bit odd, however; it tasted more like corned beef than smoked meat.  If it was smoked or spiced at all, I couldn’t taste it.  It was pleasantly salty from the brine and had a nice beefy flavour, but that’s about it.  It’s not unpleasant, but it’s not what I was expecting.

As for the rest of the sandwich, the overly dense rye bread was toasted (?!?!?), and the application of mustard was a bit too heavy-handed.  But then given the beef’s lack of flavour, a lot of mustard is probably a good thing?