An Americanized Croque Madame is still a good sandwich.

Everything on this sandwich was well cooked, but the American influence was undeniable. The bread was not a proper baguette, sharing far too much in common with the baguette’s American cousin, white bread. The eggs were well cook, but fried in the sort of way one might find at a roadside diner. The ham was certainly processed in some midwestern factory.

This is not say that I didn’t enjoy the croque madame. I enjoy plenty of inauthentic foods. But This particular sandwich simply strayed far from its French ancestry, and had I been in a typical American cafe or a shiny tin diner, I would have been happy to have been served one of the greatest sandwiches ever created, albeit Americanized. But passing this off in a cafe purporting to replicate French cuisine is a shameful abuse of the use of the word French as an adjective.

Cafe Luluc
214 Smith Street
Brooklyn