Sandwich 88: Chicken Club from Cipriani Dolci

Sorry about not having a picture of the menu; I was in too much of a hurry to order after it took well over five minutes for us (my girlfriend Jeni and I) to even get menus, so I wasn't exactly in the mood to take pictures.  Anyhow...

Cipriani Dolci is a semi-fancy restaurant in the main concourse of Grand Central.  It serves Northern Italian food and has a shockingly huge menu (honestly, I was expecting two pages at most, but it was probably about six or seven, and with lots of items on each page).  As you probably picked up from the paragraph above, the service was absolutely horrible, at least at first.   We were in line to be seated, and while the people in front of us were being seated, we were gestured to a seating area.  Yes, we weren't even seated at a table, but had to just randomly pick one ourselves.  It then took a long time to get any service; we finally had to flag down a random waiter to get anything started.  Honestly, if I hadn't had the sandwich to eat, I would have left.

Once we finally got menus and ordered, things went much more smoothly.  We were actually given quasi-royal treatment, with three different waiters at various points, which I know is common in nice Italian restaurants.  The sandwich in question was a Chicken Club, was twenty dollars (!), and looked like this:

As you can see, it was a monster, and extremely filling.  It was also damn good.  The bacon was crisp and tasty, the sauce (which I couldn't quite place) was creamy, the bread was beautifully toasted, and the chicken was perfectly cooked.  Was it worth twenty dollars?  Well, I don't really think ANY sandwich is worth twenty dollars, but I certainly was pleasantly surprised and felt satisfied afterwards.  It wasn't transformative like Roll N Roaster was (and was sixteen dollars more as well), but it was quite good.

So a solid 4.0 for the sandwich, but that has to be tempered by the horrendous service, which admittedly got better as the meal went on.  Of course, it also took about six or seven minutes for us to get the check after we asked for it, and there were several other parties around us that looked distraught by how long it was taking them to get their check or what they had asked for (one woman asked for water, and it took close to as long for her to get it as it did for me to finish my sandwich).  I can't in good conscience recommend Cipriani Dolci because of the service, which is a shame, because judging by the sandwich and the smoked salmon that Jeni got, the food is very good.