Pizza by Cer Te Turns Chicken Saltimbocca into One Heckuva Good Sandwich

Some of my favorite sandwiches take different dishes and put them between two slices of bread in a way that improves on the original. The Spaniard at Amish Market is one example of this – putting Spanish charcuterie in sandwich form. A better example is the Thanksgiving leftover sandwich (I’ve never had a bad one). So when I was at Pizza by Cer Te last month to pick up their Thanksgiving slice, I was intrigued by their chicken saltimbocca sandwich, a riff on the Italian classic. This week, I finally got a chance to try it.

Chicken saltimbocca, or at least the version I grew up eating, consists simply of chicken wrapped around prosciutto and sauteed spinach, served with a lemony sauce. Pizza by Cer Te takes grilled chicken, prosciutto, and fresh spinach, and adds fresh mozzarella and a lemon-basil-caper aioli, all served on a pressed baguette. All those flavors add up to a pretty tasty sandwich.

None of the ingredients overwhelm the others. The chicken is well-cooked, thick, and juicy, and there’s enough prosciutto to add a nice sweet and salty kick. The mozzarella is, well, fresh mozzarella, so it’s welcome on almost any sandwich I can think of. The aioli tasted great, as most aiolis do, but it wasn’t quite what I expected. I thought it would be more briny from the capers, and you can taste a bit of capers if you taste the aioli on its own, but in the sandwich it tastes more like a lemon basil pesto.

The baguette made the sandwich. Far from being too hard, it had just the right amount of crunch from its trip to the panini press. I could eat just that bread simply slathered with the aioli and be a happy Luncher.

At $8.50, the chicken saltimbocca sandwich is a tad on the pricey side for a chicken sandwich, but it does have prosciutto on it, so that’s to be expected. It’s also a satisfying lunch. I had mine with a rice ball (also very good), and wasn’t hungry again until dinner. It proves that there’s more to Pizza by Cer Te than just pizza.

Pizza by Cer Te, 132 East 56th (btw. Park+Lex) (212) 813-2020

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