Fritzl’s Lunch Box

Donny invited me to join him for lunch at Fritzl’s Lunch Box in Bushwick recently. He wanted to try their fried chicken sandwich, but when we sat down in the school cafeteria-style chairs the first thing they told us was that they were sold out of the fried chicken sandwich. Odd, since we got there early for their lunch service. Anyway, I was interested in Fritzl’s because their chef, Dan Ross-Leutwyler, has worked at Roberta‘s (among other places), one of my favorite pizza places in NYC. We started with an appetizer of the beer-battered summer squash (it seems that the vegetable used gets swapped out seasonally). The moisture inside of the squash made it piping hot inside, and the batter was light and bland. The sweet and spicy dipping sauce helped the flavor a lot.

There’s only one vegetarian main, which is the brie and avocado sandwich. Brie and avocado are both very rich, creamy ingredients, and if it was just the two of those things on the bread it would have been too much. Thankfully there are alfalfa sprouts for some textural variation. And in a masterstroke, the sandwich also has orange marmalade spread on it. The sweetness and acidity of the marmalade round out and cut through the brie and the avocado, and it’s really the marmalade that makes the sandwich.

Fritzl’s Lunch Box — 173 Irving Ave