If you've heard regulars order a "Half and Half" and wondered what exactly you get, here's the breakdown: it's half a 4 oz burger patty and half sliced grilled ham, plus cheese, lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise, all stacked on a hoagie bun and topped with pickles. It's a sandwich that gives you two of our most popular proteins in one bite.
The name is exactly as literal as it sounds, which is part of why it trips people up the first time they hear it hollered back to the cooks. It's not a burger with ham on top, and it's not a ham sandwich with a side of burger. It's built as half of each, layered together on the same hoagie bun, so you get the char and juiciness of a hand-pattied patty on one side and the salty, grilled-ham flavor on the other, tied together with melted cheese, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise, and pickles.
It's built as half of each, layered together on the same hoagie bun, so you get the char and juiciness of a hand-pattied patty on one side and the salty, grilled-ham flavor on the other.
Both halves start from the same fresh ingredients as everything else at the counter. The burger half comes from the same hand-pattied ground chuck our cooks form daily, roughly 180 pounds of it on an average day, the same stuff that goes into a Cheeseburger King or a Poor Girl. The ham half is sliced and grilled to order rather than served cold, which is what gives the sandwich its warmth and keeps the cheese properly melted across both sides.
It comes in at $11.00 on its own, or $13.00 with fries -- and if you'd rather have onion rings, you can substitute those for the fries. That puts it right in line with our other hoagie-bun sandwiches, like the Poor Girl (two burger patties, $11.00) and the Poor Boy (all ham, $10.00), so if you already know you like those, the Half and Half is worth trying as a middle ground between them.
If you can't decide between a burger and a ham sandwich next time you're at the counter, this is the answer. It's one of those menu items that regulars tend to know by name and first-timers usually discover by asking the person ahead of them in line what they just ordered, which, at a counter-service place where everybody's hollering their order back and forth anyway, is about as natural a way to learn the menu as there is.