This hoagie went so viral on TikTok, the shop ran out of bread

On an average weekend, Liberty Kitchen sells at most a hundred kale Caesar chicken cutlet sandwiches. This past weekend, “We’ve sold 1,012 since Friday,” executive chef Beau Neidhardt said. “We’ve been open seven minutes and we have sold 21,” he told me.

The fuel behind this hoagie fire? Well, TikTok.

Since April, TikToker after TikToker has unwrapped their sandwich with reverence, unsticking the masking tape affixed to the butcher paper to dramatic, ASMR effect. There’s the slow reveal of the sandwich’s innermost workings, as their hands, clutching each side of a hoagie, split it in half, and then present the cross sections to the camera. Their eyes are wide, their voiceovers following the same formula. “If you’re in Philly, you have to go to Liberty Kitchen for this sandwich,” is the now familiar refrain, but before this weekend, the restaurant would get perhaps a monthly TikTok tribute to their sandwich.

Videos are now being posted within hours, even minutes of one another. What was once a steady trickle of videos, bumping up sandwich sales occasionally, has become a raging cascade devoted to a single sandwich.

The waves of virality that the sandwich has experienced are a welcome surprise, said co-owner Matt Budenstein, giving Liberty Kitchen visibility to “people who normally wouldn’t know anything about the restaurant. We have so many new customers who are coming from all over the city and suburbs and even from far away, when typically we’re a very neighborhood spot.”

The sandwich, a longtime staple, is a favorite of Inquirer critic Craig LaBan. It’s “absolutely one of my favorite sandwiches in Philly because it amps the old cliché of the chicken-Caesar combo into something more exciting with bolder flavors and crisper textures,” he said. “The keys are that excellent, freshly fried cutlet, of course, but also the peppery kale, which is sturdy enough not to wilt against the hot chicken, and a Caesar dressing that zings with anchovy. Tuck them all inside a crusty, seeded long roll beneath a snowdrift of shaved pecorino, which is punchier than the usual Parmesan, and you have a hot hoagie powerhouse feast. Now I want one for lunch.”

This weekend was technically the third time Liberty Kitchen’s kale Caesar cutlet sandwich has gone viral. “The first one happened a few weeks ago and I think this is even more of a viral situation as a result of that one,” Budenstein said. “Now we have so many Tik Toks [tagging us] with 100,000 hits.”

Neidhardt jumped in, “It started when Craig [LaBan] mentioned it as one of the best things he ate [in 2023]. The Philly Food Ladies featured it [in April], and then a month ago, someone else.”

Sales hit 100 sandwiches a day after these videos. “And then Friday it was posted to someone else’s TikTok… since then we’ve had multiple videos posted about it.”

A TikTok video of the sandwich posted in August by dietician Lauren Smith currently has 444,600 views, and it was tagged by creator Kimberly King in a video posted on October 9 that now has nearly 200,000 views. More videos following the same format continue to be posted, fanning the flames of sandwich desire.

“This is the most wild. Definitely the person that did it this time has many more followers and is in a different algorithm [because we’re getting] people who have never eaten here. They’re traveling across state lines to eat it,” Neidhardt said. Right now, Liberty Kitchen is selling “as much as we can supply, about 300 per day.”

Caesar dressing, the salad bar stalwart has dipped in and out of fine dining for years, flirting with fancy applications like Carbone’s nationally recognized tableside Caesar salad, Liz Grothe’s Caesar toast at her Couch Cafe pop up, or Palizzi Social Club’s throwback version, dotted with semolina croutons and served in a wooden bowl. It has seen culture-shifting riffs, like Tabachoy’s Bagoong Caesar and Honeysuckle Provisions’ Black Caesar with smoked herring instead of anchovies.

Liberty Kitchen has updated its recipe for the sandwich since opening in 2019. The current iteration is “an upgraded version of the old one and it’s a major statement for the new location in Fishtown. [This is] Liberty Kitchen 2.0,” Neidhardt, who has been in his role since May 2023 said. “The old one was a salad sandwich, with chicken thighs. This is a cutlet sandwich. We use Locatelli Pecorino. The recipe for the Caesar [dressing] is Duke’s Mayo-based.”

“Are there anchovies in it?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” Neidhardt said.

The centenarian Caesar salad is accredited to Caesar Cardini of Caesar’s Restaurant in Tijuana, and sadly, its originator seems to have disliked anchovies. But as anchovies entered the picture, the dressing now hearkens back to a time when garum, the Roman fish sauce made from fermented anchovies and ancestor of Worcestershire sauce, made the Western world go round.

At heart, a kale Caesar is a singular display of good punning at work. When else has a dire exhortation with Roman gladiatorial origins (“Hail, Caesar!” derives from a familiar Latin phrase) made such delicious salad fodder? (In AD 52, mock combatants in a staged naval battle proclaimed “Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant,” or “Hail Caesar, those who are about to die, salute you” to the then emperor — or Caesar — Claudius).

Neidhardt doesn’t take credit for all of the changes the sandwich has seen. “Liberty Kitchen 2.0 has been a team effort,” he said.

As for Liberty Kitchen’s other offerings, he added, “I also want to say that I think we have one of the best breakfast sandwiches in Philly, I wish people knew that.”