He confirmed that a sandwich was indeed served at the Sloppy Joe's bar in Havana and that a version of it wound up on the menu at the Town Hall Deli in South Orange, N.J., in 1936, when it was (and still is) not a messy chopped meat sandwich but a triple-decker deli sandwich.
And the spicy fried chicken wings, a refined version of the bar classic (though still messy), combined perfectly tender meat, a slick of sharp sauce, and a scattering of sesame seeds.
At the high end, he turns a grilled double rib steak into the juicy underpinnings for a messy-looking platter of sliced meat buried under an avalanche of truffles, mushrooms, shallots and Parmesan.
Although Central uses no sauce on its barbecue, the meats were supremely messy.
Go ahead, buy a container of jumbo lump crab meat with cocktail sauce (messy, yes; tasty, yes) to enjoy as an appetizer on the train.
Last March, I headed to France's Alpe d'Huez, for the second Snowboxx festival (it was launched in Andorra in 2013), where dance music acts such as Horse Meat Disco and Eton Messy were on the bill.
Rice with chicken and shrimp ($13.95) suffers from two problems: dry breast meat and bits of messy-to-eat shrimp in the shell.
It's a messy business for not very much sweet meat.
The menu does include a few meat dishes, notably a flavorful if messy rib-eye steak heaped with yellow-tomato salsa, guacamole and a long list of adornments that somehow manages to include cracklings.
Sales were weak because eating a piece of meat on the go was a messy affair.
