Malcolm Bedell
If you’re someone who has been eating Arby’s ever since its heyday, back in the disco-loving, bell-bottomed 1970’s, you probably fall into one of two camps. The first group is constantly proselytizing Arby’s “new” menu to their friends, boasting about their solidly above-average cheesesteaks, their pork-belly sandwiches, their Greek gyros, or their innovations in the world of quick-service venison steaks.
The second group, however, longs for a simpler time. A time when a scrappy upstart fast food company with an anthropomorphic hat for a mascot was determined to bring roast beef sandwiches to an eager, road-weary drive-thru audience. A time when your meat options at Arby’s came down to only one choice: Wiggly curlicues of salty, slippery, borderline-slimy roast beef, slathered with something called “Horsey” sauce,* or nothing at all.
*Made with real horse!
It’s for fans of this bygone era, then, that Arby’s rolls out the latest overstuffed additions to its otherwise innovative menu. Or rather, they’re pumped-up, half-pound versions of the classics that made Arby’s (sorta) a household name: The Half-Pound Roast Beef Sandwich, topped with Arby’s Sauce and Horsey Sauce, the Half-Pound French Dip and Swiss, served with a sidecar of Au Jus for dipping, and the Half-Pound Beef ‘n’ Cheddar, which adds cheese sauce and red ranch sauce on an onion bun.
If you’re a fan of the classics, and by “classics” we mean “sandwiches finally packed with enough grey, lifeless, flavorless meat that you can remove it from the bun, and apply it to your face, arms, and hands, to fashion an elaborate beige flesh-disguise, so that you may finally walk inconsipcuously among your fellow man without revealing the dark reality of your horrible true identity,” Arby’s new giant-sized half pound classics are available now nationwide.
