This San Francisco Sandwich Shop Makes a Meatless Muffuletta

This muffuletta shop wins rave reviews and fanatic fans for its version of the fat New Orleans sandwich of cured Italian meats, olive salad, and cheese. The iteration is so famous, it’s in our best sandwich in every state roundup, but in an act of culinary heresy, the roasted mushroom muffuletta at Sandy’s in San Francisco uses vegetables only (dear God), mayo (say what?), is spicy and served hot (don’t faint), unlike the classic created in 1906 at Central Grocery by Sicilian immigrant Salvatore Lupo.   

Don’t worry, purists: The muffuletta is from New Orleans native Peterson Harter, who makes the sandwich with a pound of roasted cremini mushrooms, a quart of Kalamata olives, cherry peppers, pickled cauliflower, carrots and capers, scallions, garlic confit, Cajun spices, and a touch of Tabasco. He toasts the round seeded bread from Firebrand Artisan Breads in Oakland in a sandwich press. 

“I think if you close your eyes, it’s hard to tell it’s not meat,” says Harter of the intense depth of flavor. In fact, though my eyes are open whenever I eat it, it still tastes like meat but with a complex flavor profile that drove me to ask about every last ingredient in it. He also makes a standard muffuletta, but uses prosciutto instead of plain ham, provolone piccante (aged for more bite), salami, mortadella, no Swiss, and the same olive salad (no green olives), giardiniera, and spice level. “I use cherry peppers for in-your-face-flavor,” he adds. “I like spice in everything I eat.” 

“I was shocked and surprised and couldn’t help but be skeptical as it was coming out of San Francisco – especially since he was doing a vegetarian version not done here. I’m a hard-core, traditional New Orleanian,” says Poppy Tooker, the cookbook author and host of Louisiana Eats!, a podcast and radio show broadcast on NPR affiliates in Southern Gulf states. “But I was just blown away by his mushroom muffuletta. He’s retained the authenticity of flavor of the original, and tweaked it just a bit for a 21st century audience and where he is.”

A Culinary Institute of America graduate, Harter explains the inspiration. “I think it was just being in California. I was trying to find a replacement for meat.” During an internship at the Four Seasons in Santa Barbara, he drove up to San Francisco and was thrilled by the produce at the Ferry Building Marketplace farmers market, relocating to the city in 2017. In New Orleans — where his late mother, Lee Barnes, had a cooking school — Harter cooked at K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen, late chef Paul Prudhomme’s restaurant, and Stella! (both closed).

After losing his job as a bartender and host at The Progress in 2020, Harter started Bread Spread Pickle, a pop-up for home-baked bread, pickled vegetables, and hummus, with his girlfriend. Wondering what to do with all his extra olive salad, he then opened Sandy’s as a muffuletta pop-up in a liquor store, Maison Corbeaux, that was blessed with a pizza open, naming it after his father’s nickname and his love for surfing (“I was usually sandy”). The pandemic pivot led to the standalone Sandy’s opening in 2023 in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. 

The small shop, with New Orleans-inspired décor featuring Jazz Fest posters, a Mardi Gras mask, beads, and a sun decoration from a krewe float, sells a 1/8 muffuletta for $14.50 ($98 for a massive 12-inch round sandwich). Sandy’s is also a popular vendor at Outside Lands, San Francisco’s summer music festival, and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, the city’s free music festival, where Patti Smith and Mavis Staples recently performed. “A lot of the same people go to Jazz Fest, I see their Tipitina’s and Dr. John t-shirts. So they know muffulettas,” Harter says. 

Interestingly, the original muffuletta was a variation on tradition. “In Sicily, a muffuletta is a traditional round, soft, sesame-seeded bread, seasoned in different ways in different towns for different religious feasts,” says Allison Scola, owner of Experience Sicily. “For example, in Palermo, it has olive oil, salt, pepper, oregano, one or two salted anchovies inside the cut bread, and is dusted with grated caciocavallo cheese. It’s eaten traditionally for the Day of the Dead, November 2, when families visited cemeteries to picnic at grave sites. In Naro town in Agrigento in southwest Sicily, a muffuletta contains sundried tomatoes, salted sardines (or other fish or meat, like preserved tuna or mortadella and salami), and cheese, and is consumed for the Immaculate Conception on December 8. Many regional variations and spellings exist.”

Tooker adds that, “Central Grocery is across from the old French Market, once mostly a Sicilian market, and the truck farmers would buy meats, vegetables, and cheeses for lunch. So Lupo took all that antipasto and put it inside bread to create an American-style sandwich.”

That legacy lives on from New Orleans to San Francisco, even when the ingredients change a bit.