Entry · catalog no. 1130
chopped cheese
/ /ˌtʃɑpt ˈtʃiz/ /chopt CHEEZ
noun · East Harlem, New York City · 1990s
✓ Verified
1.
A bodega grill sandwich: beef patties broken down with a spatula against the flattop, onions worked in, seasoning shaken over it, cheese laid on and folded through until the whole thing is one hot chopped mass. It goes into a hero roll with mayo, lettuce, tomato, and whatever else the counter offers. It is neither a cheeseburger nor a cheesesteak, and the chopping is the entire point — the meat is not a patty and not shaved steak but something worked into a third texture. Often shortened to chop cheese, which is the older-sounding form uptown.
“Chop cheese with everything, salt pepper ketchup, and let it sit on the grill a minute longer.”
Origin & Attribution
The sandwich comes out of East Harlem's bodegas in the 1990s, and the consensus birthplace is the deli at 110th and First Avenue that everyone calls Hajji's, now signed Blue Sky. Most accounts inside the store point to the late Carlos Soto, who ran the grill there for over twenty years; whether he chopped a burger to fit a hero or adapted something closer to the Yemeni dish dagha yamneeya alongside his Yemeni coworkers is genuinely unsettled. The community that made it was Black and Latino uptown Manhattan and the Bronx, buying a hot four-dollar meal from a counter open late. Food media's discovery narrative dates the sandwich to 2016 — a national outlet's reporter went uptown that year and wrote that most New Yorkers had never heard of it, the New York Times ran a rise-to-fame piece that November, and Whole Foods was selling an eight-dollar version by December. All of that is roughly twenty-five years after the fact. It was already in print in 2008, on Harlem residents' lips as a 1990s memory in 2011 reporting, and on national television in 2014.
2008
'Chopped cheese burger' appears in print in a hip-hop blog comment, the earliest known written attestation
2014
'Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown' airs the sandwich on its October 5 Bronx episode, prompting an immediate uptown argument that it is a Harlem creation
2016
Food media frames it as a new find; Whole Foods sells an eight-dollar version and the sandwich becomes shorthand for food gentrification
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
East Harlem, New York City · 1990s
Spoken by
Black and Latino Harlem and the Bronx — bodega customers uptown
$CHOPPEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady36 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
78/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1990
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Dervedia Thomas, 'Residents question Harlem's longevity as the Black Mecca,' Columbia Journalism School City Beats, quoting Harlem residents on 1990s chop cheese sandwiches — December 11, 2011
news · reported
■
'Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown,' Bronx episode, CNN — aired October 5, 2014
television · broadcast
■
+ Cite a sourceEli Rosenberg, 'The Chopped Cheese's Sharp Rise to Fame,' The New York Times — November 2016
news · reported
See also