There is a Wegman’s about 10 minutes from my dad’s house in upstate New York. On the list of grocery stores I frequent, Wegman’s is No. 1, because I know they have the best selection of items and I can usually get a pretty awesome sandwich from their deli.
When I went to Wegman’s today, it was to get a handful of items and a sandwich. The only thing is I was making the sandwich, not some teenager who really didn’t want to explain to me whether they prefer the everything bread or white bread. And the selection of items does not matter, because I am purposely getting the crappiest versions of the following three things that I can acquire:
- Bread
- Grape jelly
- Mayonnaise
I am going to make and consume Bulls forward Nikola Mirotic’s sandwich from Dante’s deepest layer of the Inferno. While Mirotic claims he does not like them, well, that is the exact thing someone should say when they enjoy a sandwich that consists of grape jelly and mayo smashed together. There is no way I regret that sentence several hundred words from now.
Upon getting to Wegman’s, I had a plan. I was going to pull a hat low, put in earbuds, go as fast as possible getting all the ingredients, and possibly shave my beard upon getting home in the event someone might remember what my face looks like. Obviously no one in their right mind is going to go “I bet that schmuck is purchasing all of these items to eat them together,” because no one is sick enough to think another human being would do that to their palate, but I do not want to take any chances.
I did run into one issue: There were no self-checkouts, which means this experiment would require some form of human interaction, much to my chagrin. Fortunately the very nice Wegman’s employee kept me engaged with conversation about the cold weather and did not ask a single question about my dietary habits.
Upon getting home, the sandwich was constructed and left open face for this picture:
Now, I anticipated that it would taste horrific. The issue was there were two hurdles I had to surpass first: Visually, it’s an abomination, and when it comes to smell, well, you can imagine what mayonnaise and grape jelly combine to smell like. Imagine a doctor’s office with a bad air freshener, it’s approximately that.
But we’re all here for the taste. Let’s go to the film.
It tasted like getting dumped by the person you thought you’d marry some day. The pipes froze in my apartment and this is still the worst thing to happen to me this week.
The thing that makes it so repugnant is that your palate gets coated by grape jelly, and once that flavor starts to settle, the mayonnaise comes in like a bat out of hell and takes over your entire mouth. It’s terrible. It’s the kind of thing that has me wondering if Uproxx’s HR department will let me file a complaint against myself.
But one thought crossed my mind: What if I just went into that first bite thinking it’d be bad but not knowing what to expect? What if my fear of the unknown caused my judgement to err in such a way that I was biased before I even started? Perhaps the mere thought of the sandwich made it so I would hate it no matter what, and now that I know what to expect, a second bite wouldn’t be nearly as bad?
So I went in for seconds. This time, I decided to take a bite that seemed to have more mayo than grape jelly — maybe having the first flavor hit the tongue be something a little more tangy and having that morph into sweetness would make it more palatable.
There is a video of the second bite. As it turns out, mayonnaise and grape jelly is an abhorrent combination no matter what. We decided as an editorial staff not to post the video in here, because there is a lot of profanity and weird noises that come from spitting up a sandwich and stuff. Just know that the second bite made me contemplate god, existence, and whether it’s worth leaving the writing game to become a sous chef at a restaurant in the Alps. You know, the kind of place where no one would ever want to order a grape jelly and mayonnaise sandwich under any circumstances.
