Winner: Cajun Reuben

Restaurant: Restaurant IRON, Pensacola, FL

Sandwich creator: Chef Alex McPhail

Inspiration: “Louisiana’s crawfish boiling traditions.”

Key ingredients: Crab-boiled corned beef, bacon choucroute, Swiss cheese, Iota sauce (named after a small Louisiana town)

Why it’s special: Sliced corned beef is marinated in a “strong” batch of crab boil seasoning before it’s cooked with bacon choucroute.

Price: $9

Food cost: $2.52

What the judges said: Who doesn’t love a good corned beef sandwich? And thankfully, if you’re a fanatic, corned beef, for the most part, tastes pretty much the same (awesome) from one city to the next. But McPhail, perhaps on a bender that involved a crab boil with his pals in Louisiana, returned to Pensacola, looked at a pile of corned beef and asked, “Why not?” So the spice mixture that is used to flavor the water in which crabs and other shellfish are boiled found its way on to his corned beef. It was a chocolate meets peanut butter moment that made a whole lot of people yell, “Eureka!” [Editor’s note: Nobody here is that dorky, but we understand the nerdy excitement.]

Honorable mentions

• Porkstrami: Swift’s Attic, Austin, TX
• The Uber Smoked Double: Wagshal’s, Washington, DC
• Reu-Bert: Kingy’s Pizza Pub, Canal Winchester, OH
• The Bistro Reuben: The Bistro on Park Avenue, Winter Park, FL

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