Chopped Cheese Image Used Under Creative Commons License From 365daysofcrockpot.com
My Citizens! The end of the year is upon us – and after two classic recipes of haute French cuisine, I have decided to allow the pendulum to swing ALL the way to the other societal extreme. Today, I am honored to share My amped-up recipe for a beloved bodega classic of NYC plebeians from all walks of life and economic status! I speak of nothing less than the acclaimed Chopped Cheese – a humble sandwich replete with a father from Spanish Harlem, becoming a beloved icon of NYC takeout lunches and created from a mashup of American food culture, Hispanic ingenuity and with a culinary detour through…Yemen?! More on this in a moment.
With the new Socialist Muslim Mayor about to begin his first term in the City, I have high hopes that we will see a return to policies favoring the “little people” who are the true sinew of NYC life and remind us all that NYC – AND AMERICA – is truly supposed to be a melting pot! His Honor Mayor Mamdani has seen a surprising reconciliation with President Trump and I hope both the Jewish and MAGA communities will give the man a chance before throwing further aspersions. The Mayor is seeking to unite a city fractured across ethnic and religious fault lines – and like My pan-NYC Chopped Cheese, this is a NYC amalgamation I fully support. #endrant
For those of you who suffer from the affliction of never having been born in the greatest city on Earth, you may not be aware of what exactly a bodega is and how they are part of the warp and weft of hard-working NYC urbanites and their residential life! Bodegas are the ancestral home of the Chopped Cheese and to know Chopped Cheese, you MUST first understand the bodega experience and its surprisingly diverse origins!
In New York City vernacular, a bodega is a small owner-operated convenience store serving hot and prepared food, often open late hours and typically with ethnic market influences. The New York City Department of Health defines a bodega as any store of sufficient size “that sells milk, meat or eggs but is not a specialty store (bakery, butcher, chocolate shop, etc.) and doesn’t have more than two cash registers”. Most famously located on New York City’s street corners and associated with immigrant communities as well as the Puerto Rican community, they are romanticized for their convivial culture and colorful character. As of 2020, there were an estimated 13,000 bodegas across New York City.
In Spanish, bodega is a term for “storeroom” or “wine cellar”, or “warehouse”, with a similar origin to the words “boutique” and “apothecary”; the precise meaning varies regionally in the Spanish language, and the later New York City term evolved from the Puerto Rican and Cuban usage for “small grocery”. (In contemporary Cuba, the term now usually connotes a government ration store.)
In English, the first printed appearance of the bodega dates to a travelogue of Spain from 1846, describing wine cellars. The Sun reported the first bodega opening in New York City in 1902; it was described as a Spanish “barroom”, more like a cantina. The more specific meaning of a type of New York City Puerto Rican convenience-store only came about in the mid-20th century, with the first print appearance in Time in 1956; though the term has also been applied retrospectively to such establishments as far back as the 1920s.
The New York City “bodega” resembles, and may overlap with, a delicatessen, newsstand, corner store, corner grocery store, or candy store. The Atlantic noted that “the bodega business model lends itself to selling non-perishable foods that are often unhealthy.” In 2005, the New York City Department of Health launched a Healthy Bodegas Initiative to assist bodegas in stocking healthier food. Nonetheless, bodega-reliant areas such as the Bronx—which had 25 bodegas for every supermarket as of 2019—continue to be assessed as food deserts.
New York City’s bodegas were popularized in the mid-twentieth century by Puerto Ricans. Some stores were named after places in Puerto Rico. Although they were initially documented in the 1930s—a 50th anniversary was marked on Spanish-language radio station WADO in 1986—the first bodega may have opened even earlier. Early examples were establishments serving factory workers in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and La Marqueta in East Harlem, where stalls serving Puerto Rican staples (at first included among goods sold by local Jewish merchants) became increasingly Puerto-Rican-owned in the 1920s and 1930s.
Other Latino groups in the city have also embraced the bodega, serving a wider variety of Latin American cuisine. Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños at Hunter College owns a collection of historical bodega photography. Despite their Hispanic origins, by the late 2010s approximately half of all New York bodegas were operated by Yemeni American immigrants. Yemeni business owners led a campaign of bodega closures in February 2017 in protest of Executive Order 13769, a travel ban enacted by US President Donald Trump.
One famous bodega, Gem Spa, was a gathering place for beat poets in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1960s. Gem Spa is also thought by some to be the birthplace of the egg cream. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2005 musical In the Heights centers on the character of Usnavi, the owner of a local bodega in Washington Heights, Manhattan. The Bronx has also experienced a notable increase in stores and bookshops highlighting local cultural identity. For example, Bronx Native and its “Bodega Dreams” collection intentionally celebrate and preserve these community roots.
As further elucidated in a great historical article from leshp.org:
New York City’s bodegas serve multiple roles: they are convenience stores, informal gathering spots, and cultural anchors. Open around the clock, these neighborhood staples provide essentials like coffee, bread, and snacks, while also functioning as social hubs. These small, family-run shops, often open 24 hours and stocked with everything from plantains to Polish beer, reflect the ever-shifting tides of New York’s identity.
Bodegas are instantly recognizable: hand-painted signage—often yellow with red lettering—and handwritten signs advertising Lotto or bottled water. The windows adorned with beer ads or images of sandwiches that look nothing like the real thing. The plump and friendly cat patrolling the narrow aisles. A classic bodega often features hand-painted murals, like symbols and scenes of the Caribbean or tributes to local residents who passed away. A bodega can never be mistaken for anything else.
Origins in Latin America
The word “bodega” comes from the Spanish term for “wine cellar” or “storeroom,” but its cultural DNA stretches back further. During the Moorish occupation of Spain (711–1492), Arabic influences introduced concepts of communal markets and small-scale trade. After the Spanish colonization of the Americas, the term evolved to describe general stores that sold goods to rural and urban populations.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, bodegas became central to daily life in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. These stores were often family-run, offering not just food but credit to neighbors in times of need. They stocked region-specific items alongside imported Spanish goods like olives and sardines. This model of commerce—rooted in trust, cultural familiarity, and accessibility—laid the groundwork for what would later emerge in New York City.
Welcome to New York City
The term “bodega” took hold in New York City by the ’50s as Puerto Rican migrants settled in NYC after World War II. Fleeing economic hardship and largely attracted by factory jobs, they moved into crowded tenements and public housing in long-standing, working-poor, immigrant enclaves. Downtown, Puerto Rican and other Latino residents transformed Alphabet City into Loisaida (a Spanglish rebranding of “Lower East Side”), where bodegas emerged as lifelines.
These stores bridged old and new worlds, serving spices and foods from home, alongside American staples. Unlike the pushcart markets of earlier Jewish and Italian immigrants, bodegas became permanent fixtures—part grocery, part social hub—where neighbors traded news and recipes, their shelves reflecting the diversity of diasporic life.
By the 1960s, the Lower East Side had one of the highest concentrations of bodegas in the city. Dominican migrants, escaping political turmoil under the Trujillo dictatorship, carved out a corner of NYC for themselves, like all previous immigrant groups. And like their Puerto Rican neighbors, Domincans faced a longing for foods and ingredients from their tropical homeland.
While Puerto Rican and Dominican communities laid the foundation for NYC’s bodega culture, Yemeni and other Arabic immigrants began arriving in significant numbers during the 1970s and 1980s, fleeing political unrest, economic instability, and civil war in Yemen. Bringing their culinary traditions and entrepreneurial spirit, they opened halal bodegas that catered not only to Muslim residents but also to a growing appetite for diverse, globally influenced foods. These stores introduced NYC to “exotic” spices and dishes, while transforming store counters into communal dining spaces.
Gentrification and a New Challenge: The 1990s–Today
As the Lower East Side caught the attention of developers and luxury high rises started springing up in the late ’90s, rising rents threatened longtime businesses. Hundreds of businesses, along with several bodegas and thousands of long-time residents, have since been priced out.
Chains like 7-Eleven, rising rents, and changing populations have decimated small shops. The average retail rent in the Lower East Side rose by 62% between 2009 and 2019 (according to Crain’s New York Business).
As the New York City and the Lower East Side continues to evolve, these shops remind us that community isn’t just built—it’s stocked, shelf by shelf, by real people and real families.
It was at a Yemeni-owned bodega that the chopped cheese (also known as the chop cheese), was born. Found in bodegas throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens, it is made on a grill with ground beef (typically pre-formed ground beef patties), onions, adobo or other seasonings, and cheap cheese, all of which are chopped together on the grill as the meat and onions cook and the cheese melts. It is served with lettuce, tomatoes, and condiments on a hero roll.
The actual origins of the sandwich are up for debate, although generally most agree it was first created in a Spanish Harlem bodega called Hajji’s Deli, also known as Blue Sky Deli. There is speculation that the sandwich was an adaptation of an Arab specialty, dagha yamneeya (دقة يمنية), which is essentially cooked chopped meat and vegetables served with Yemeni bread. Hajji’s Deli counterman Frankie Frank (a Mexican immigrant) invented the sandwich for himself (obviously under divine inspiration!) sometime in the 1990s, after which the concept spread to other bodegas.
The sandwich gained significant media attention in the 2010s, starting with a 2014 episode of Parts Unknown in which Anthony Bourdain, a lifelong New Yorker, told a group of students in the Bronx that he’d never heard of a Chopped Cheese sandwich. In 2016 a reporter for Insider described the sandwich as “something most New Yorkers had never heard of”, despite it being well-known in multiple parts of the city.
Those who grew up eating the sandwich at their local bodegas made accusations the sandwich was being “Columbused”—that is, “discovered” by the majority culture; in this case, lower Manhattanites. Multiple upscale restaurants and groceries began serving the sandwich, sparking accusations of cultural appropriation. Critics noted that the sandwich, as served in bodegas prior to the interest generated in the media, was generally priced at $4 or $5, while the versions offered by upscale purveyors were often two to three times that.
In popular culture, the Chopped Cheese has made its way into hip hop culture, being featured in or the subject of many songs. Harlem rapper Cam’ron filmed his music video “Child of the Ghetto” at Hajji’s Deli. The chopped cheese is referenced in Will Trent, season 3, episode 10, as the stomach contents of a victim. The sandwich has also been the topic of a documentary on the website First We Feast. The documentary Hometown Hero: The Legend of New York’s Chopped Cheese discusses the origins of the sandwich and its cultural history. In the documentary, the sandwich is referred to as “Harlem’s favorite”.
With the history of this New York City icon now firmly documented, let us discuss MY superlative adaptation – and a recipe that presented a formidable challenge to the CULINARY GENIUS that alone is MINE to command! This recipe was tricky because – as noted earlier – Chopped Cheese should not become a “colonialized” bastard of what it was meant to always be – cheap, good eats. My normal cleverness to “zhuzh” up a recipe just didn’t feel right. So, I challenged Myself – keep the humble spirit of the Chopped Cheese intact while elevating it without compromising what it was always meant to be.
My Citizens – I SUCCEEDED!
Start with your basics – 80/20 ground beef, a sub/hoagie roll of quality, onions, and Velveeta. The original recipe uses American cheese, I just happen to prefer Velveeta and I think it also melts better – and do NOT turn your nose up on either cheese choice, please. Where I was able to get creative was in the seasoning salt and with the Chopped Cheese sauce gracing the sandwich. I wanted to salute the melting pot that epitomizes NYC, while staying true to the Hispanic and Arabic roots of the sandwich. My seasoning salt reflects a range of Soul Food American, Hispanic, Middle Eastern and European ingredients that help redefine the Chopped Cheese as the pan-NYC delight it truly is!
The backbone of My Chopped Cheese pan-NYC seasoning salt is Marion-Kay Chicken Seasoning Plus, aka Formula 99-X, aka the KFC secret herbs and spices blend (plus salt and MSG) – buy it from Amazon here. It is well attested that Harland Sanders asked Bill Summers of Marion-Kay Spices in Brownstown, Indiana to recreate his secret blend of 11 herbs and spices after he left the company. Sanders recommended the Marion-Kay seasoning to franchisees over the corporate version, as he believed the latter had been made inferior by the corporation’s inattention.
Following Sanders’ passing, KFC sued Marion-Kay in 1982, and the latter was forbidden from selling its mixture to KFC franchises as a result. The Marion-Kay seasoning is still sold under the name “99-X”, and according to Sanders biographer Josh Ozersky, it is indistinguishable from the original KFC recipe. I mix 99-X with Knorr Aromat,Yemeni Hawaiij spice blend, porcini powder, smoked Spanish paprika, granulated garlic, and Mexican Oregano – buy them from the assigned links. My unmatched seasoning salt will send your palate to the Empyrean crystalline heavens above, I promise you – even an old sneaker bathed in this magic dust becomes Ambrosial (do NOT ask Me how I determined that fact, please!).
I also use a long-standing Chef’s trick to both brown the onions and to also keep the ground beef moist in Chopped Cheese – use a large pinch of baking soda to facilitate both of these laudable goals. The baking soda lowers the Ph of the onions and the beef to achieve these results! I prefer to use yellow heirloom tomato (de-seeded, please!) and structure My Chopped Cheese with different colors (white bread, orange cheese, browned meat, yellow tomatoes, red pickled peppers and green lettuce).
Please follow My lead with the lettuce furthest from the heat of the beef, onion and cheese mixture, so it doesn’t wilt – and do NOT skip the mandatory step of wrapping the sandwich for a minute or two to help the insides steam. I like to use avocado oil in this Chopped Cheese recipe for its buttery flavor and ultra-high smoke point. If you have a stovetop griddle, please do use it – if not, you can buy one here or just use a large cast iron frying pan.
Some Chopped Cheese variants include peppers in the recipe – as does mine! I absolutely wanted to represent the large African diaspora in NYC in My recipe and decided to use pickled peppadew peppers from South Africa – you can buy them here and they add great savor indeed. The standard condiment adorning chopped cheese is basically deconstructed Thousand Island dressing (ketchup, mayo, sometimes relish) – I have combined My fave brands but instead of boring ketchup, I bring in the former Soviet Union NYC diaspora with Hunter’s style satsebeli sauce from Georgia (a tomato condiment with herbs and spices), plus a splash of tarragon vinegar.
Thus, My Chopped Cheese sandwich recipe is now complete and ready for your enjoyment – I hope you enjoy this along with other ground beef sandwich classics such as My superlative upscale Sloppy Joe or the divine Utah pastrami burger!
In advance: Make the seasoning salt – combine all the ingredients thoroughly. Make a few batches of this, combine all and put into a spice jar. Keep tightly closed when not in use.
Make the chopped cheese sauce – combine all ingredients in a bowl. Reserve and chill.
Make the chopped cheese: heat a griddle (strongly preferred!) or large cast-iron pan over medium-high heat. Add oil, then add onions and baking soda immediately and let everything sear for 1–2 minutes, mixing occasionally.
Then, add ground beef in loose chunks. Season generously with Hirshon Pan-NYC Seasoning Salt.
Chop aggressively with a metal spatula (or two). You’re not browning crumbles — you’re creating a cohesive, juicy beef pile.
Then, use your spatula to shape the chopped beef mixture until it roughly matches the shape of your sub roll, and top with sliced Velveeta cheese. The cheese should not take longer than a minute or two to melt into the meat.
Chop again, folding the melted cheese fully into the beef until very gooey and unified.
Toast the hero roll cut-side down on the griddle until lightly crisp.
Smear Hirshon Chopped Cheese Sauce on both sides of the roll. Construct as follows: Beef-cheese mixture on the bottom roll, then peppers on top of the beef, then tomato slices, then lettuce.
Close, press lightly, wrap in foil or paper (this is important), and let steam for 1-2 minutes.
Eat immediately.
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