Surviving college means surviving, among other things, your diet. You may fancy yourself a high-achieving, independent adult, but chances are you’re still eating Easy Mac five nights out of finals week. We wouldn’t have it any other way: nutritionally bankrupt, character rich. Freshman roommates bond over illegally boiled ramen; library insomniacs bring each other bacon-egg-and-cheese bagels. Comfort fuel.

We are, you can tell, a little cockeyed about food* — food, that is, made delicious by circumstance as much as ingredient. Get ready for some enthusiasm: introducing Tasty-Ass Sandwiches of the Ivy League, an occasional series that will rhapsodize about the culinary genre — stuff between bread — that feeds us best. Either you understand this feature or you don’t. First up: Columbia’s Spicy Special.

[Ed.: Thanks is owed Armin Rosen, Columbia '10, for penning an impeccable Spicy tribute last week that gave us an excuse to do this. Go read it after this, it's superior.] 

We had our first Spicy at 2 or 3 in the morning on a Wednesday, having been bodily carried halfway to the Crack Deli on 109th Street by an incredulous, evangelical hockey player. No sandwich was as good as he was promising, especially not this meager apportionment of turkey on what had to be two-day-old bread, sold for three dollars and fifty cents at an establishment we knew primarily as a clutch spot for looseys.

But then we peeled the foil back and bit, finding Christ, and/or heroin, in a Baghdad mouthful. (Hot, and explosive.) It was Nov. 11, 2004 and now it was our turn to be incredulous, as we worked our dropped jaw up and down, discovering the immaculate layering of just enough cajun turkey, pepper jack cheese, L, T, and an indeterminate brand of deli mayo in a flattened, toasted hero. It lasted the exact duration of the walk home. It was perfection. Had the owner put the crack in the sandwich?

It’s difficult to explain the Spicy Special to the uninitiated. Is it spicy? Yes, a little. Is it special? How dare you. As Armin wrote, a Spicy is a night out at Columbia; sold at the deli right down from upperclass bar 1020, forgoing one at the end of the night just isn’t thinkable. Look, all we know is that we tend to get overexcited — can you tell? — about things like this, and yet despite our incessant hyping of the Spicy to friends and professors, the sammich still exceeds expectations. Stretches of Amsterdam Avenue can sound like a gonzo after last call, as the sloshed comment unsubtly on their Spicies on the walk home. Once we gave a grown man a bite and he hugged us. Bridging the gulfs between jock and hipster, cokehead and study rat, the Spicy is the undisputed sandwich of Columbia University.

We’ll confess, this series is only half-baked; we know of excellent ‘wichcraft at Penn, Princeton, Harvard and Yale, but need taste buds on the ground at Brown, Cornell and Dartmouth. If you’re a student at the latter set, and you feel us on this, get in touch. Club Sandwich begins now.

*(A couple years ago, half of us made the other go a week without paying for food, subsisting only on club-meeting pizza and dining-dollar benevolence. He gained weight.)