Photo Note: If you’re thinking “Isn’t that sandwich in the photo upside-down?”, the answer is yes. Perhaps I was too distracted by the delicious scent of Bourbon chicken to notice; the sandwich is upside-down in every photo that I took during my visit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The Wooden Spoon, a mom-and-pop bakery and sandwich shop located at 4350 Viking Loop in Bossier City, is one of those wonderful little restaurants that flies under the radar, happily serving a small but dedicated fan base. They’re arguably best-known for outstanding Cuban sandwiches, homemade cookie cakes and gift baskets. On my recent visit, I decided to try one of their newest specialty subs, the Mighty B-52 ($8.79).
I wrongly assumed that this sub was another case of a business simply wanting to honor nearby Barksdale Air Force Base by naming a product after the B-52 Stratofortress. This did not turn out to be the case. Jeffrey Judge, co-owner of The Wooden Spoon, served 23 years in the United States Air Force before retiring and joining his wife in the bakery business. The sandwich itself, sort of a super-charged Bourbon chicken sub, was actually designed as a humorous commentary on the B-52 bomber.
“We knew that if we were going to call a sandwich ‘the B-52,’ it had to smoke a lot and it had to leak, just like that bomber does,” Judge said. “It took about a month of tweaking to get it right. We actually had to install a whole new vent hood in our kitchen just to make the thing because it smokes so much.”
The decadent sandwich is stuffed with house-brined and roasted chicken in Bourbon sauce (as Judge points out, “Bourbon” is a nod to New Orleans’ Bourbon Street, the dish does not contain any bourbon), crispy bacon, caramelized onions, pepperoni, lettuce, tomato and cheese. The placement of the pepperoni – there’s a liner of pepperoni slices beneath all of the other ingredients, which prevents the house-baked sub roll from becoming soggy – makes the sandwich easier to eat. The freshness of the roll itself during my visit was remarkable.
One last thing: If you are a potato salad person (you know who you are!), don’t leave The Wooden Spoon without trying their take on the classic Southern dill potato salad. It’ll likely divide folks into camps of “love it” or “hate it”, with big, firm chunks of skin-on new potatoes covered in a ton of fresh dill and mayonnaise. I loved it, but it’s about as far from the average mustard-style potato salad as it could possibly be.
If you enjoy this kind of local food coverage, explore our older posts or download Eat Here: A Food Lover’s Guide to Shreveport-Bossier.
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