What makes me love it with such evangelical intensity is what it has taught me about the true meaning of its salumi-filled counterpart. Sandwich aficionados will spend happy hours yelling at one another about the proper cold cuts for an Italian combo, debating with Talmudic intensity the relative merits of soppressata versus capicola, or whether to include a layer of mortadella (nice, in my opinion) or prosciutto (never; a textural abomination). But the Vegitalian renders all of those arguments entirely moot, by evoking all the best parts of a meat-laden sandwich meatlessly. What’s important isn’t the meat itself but what it provides: heft, bite, umami, complexity, funk, fat. In the hands of a sandwich master, these things can come from elsewhere—in the Vegitalian, thin slabs of fresh mozzarella and, of all things, a thick layer of roasted sweet-potato slices.