All the sandwiches at Lorenzo California
In the fall of 2019, Renato Araujo and his wife, Cynthia Raslan, spent a month in Florence eating sandwiches. Araujo, a longtime restaurant manager in Los Angeles, was on a research trip to find the best. Earlier that year, he and his wife decided to take the money they had saved to buy a house, and open a sandwich shop instead.
On one of the couple’s treks to try a new sandwich, Araujo couldn’t find the shop. While they walked up and down the streets of Florence, they spotted a family with a little boy. They were so taken with him, they stopped to say hello.
“He was dressed up like a gentleman,” he said. “I told him, ‘Man, you dressed up so nice.’ I asked what his name was, and he said ‘Lorenzo.’”
The family happened to be standing in front of the sandwich shop.
“We stopped to talk to the family because of the little boy,” he said. “We never would have found the place. When we were wondering what to call our place, me and my wife looked at each other and both said ‘Lorenzo.’”
The pandemic hit shortly after their return to Los Angeles, and their plans to open a shop were put on hold. After three years, Lorenzo California opened on Little Santa Monica in Beverly Hills in March.
The sandwiches are modeled after the ones he ate in Florence: minimal ingredients on good bread.
Federico Fernandez, co-owner and executive pastry chef at Bianca restaurant in Culver City, bakes the bread for the shop at 4 a.m. every morning. It’s a variation on focaccia, though baked into individual rectangles versus large pans that need to be cut. It’s thinner, and lighter too, with a crust that cracks but doesn’t quite fracture. With good extra-virgin olive oil and flaky sea salt, the rustic flavor of focaccia is there, without the dense, heavy middle.
The bread is baked once a day, with enough to make about 75 sandwiches. Once they’re out, that’s it for the day.
Raslan takes the orders next to the deli case and Araujo slices the meats and builds the sandwiches to order.
The fennel-tinged finocchiona salame on the Salamino sandwich is shaved so thinly, it seems to melt right into the cushion of silky parmigiano sauce and sliced, oil-soaked artichokes.
The namesake sandwich, the Lorenzo, features the same parmigiano sauce, made with boiled and blended cream and parmigiano reggiano, along with roasted red peppers, toasted pistachios and pale pink sheets of mortadella. The flavors are simple and direct, though Araujo said some purists still come in asking for sliced mortadella on bread.
The most extravagant offering is the Zola, constructed with meaty, almost smoky bresaola, a drizzle of truffle honey, white onion agrodolce and gorgonzola cheese. It’s a whopping $35. The sticker shock is less of a shock when you account for the shower of fresh, shaved black truffle over the finished sandwich.
In the near future, Araujo plans to switch off the lights in the deli case in the evenings and open for dinner with a full menu of pasta and wine.