To the Manager of 212

Compared to other, lesser Ivy League schools, Columbia has few real traditions that we students can enjoy. While a few of the more eager freshmen waste precious daylight hours looking for the owl in Alma Mater’s flowing robes, they won’t experience anything that is truly a tradition to write home about (no, the Core does not count).

I enjoyed a most beautiful tradition for my first three years at Columbia. Whenever I honored this tradition, I felt a deep sense of communion with the University and for a brief, brief moment I was able to ignore the various indignities that my fellow students and I suffer all too often at the hands of this school.

That tradition was the regular consumption of Alexander Hamilton’s Roast Beef Mexicali prepared by sandwich artisans at your esteemed campus eatery. This sandwich, a brilliant combination of roast beef, pepper jack cheese, lettuce, tomato, and chipotle mayonnaise on the freshest of Kaiser rolls, was delicious. Not only did the consumption of the Mexicali lead to feelings of immense happiness, it was also a historic treasure. The sandwich was, according to what I’ve been telling new students, invented by Alexander Hamilton during the Revolutionary War. You may not be aware of its glorious origins, but I will tell you the tale.

When he was asked by General Washington to create a secret weapon to destroy the British, Hamilton instantly whipped up the sandwich, even going so far as to hold the roast beef and pepper jack cheese over flame with his bare hands so the cheese could melt (it would be some 20 years before the advent of the microwave, so this was necessary). Hamilton threw the perfected sandwich squarely into King George’s face and said, “Taste America. Taste freedom.” The surrender papers were promptly drawn up and America has been independently owned ever since thanks to Hamilton’s culinary genius. How Washington got the presidency over Hamilton despite this heroism is still a subject of heated debate among historians.

In the spirit of these martial origins, I liked to put some chipotle mayonnaise on my face as war paint before eating. It was total immersion dining and with each bite excellent waves of euphoria washed over me, the satisfaction lingering in my synapses long after the sandwich was finished. I would howl to the sky in a mix of both satisfaction and despair. It was beautiful.

But shame on you, because this tradition can be no longer, for you have unilaterally declared a new list of “Columbia Classics,” replacing the prestigious Roast Beef Mexicali with some preposterous turkey monstrosity that you call “The Chipotle Turkey.” If you think I’m going to order this tasteless joke of a sandwich, I assure you: I shan’t. I like to think that I harbor no hate in my heart, but I hate this new sandwich more than anything in the world, even though I have neither seen it nor tasted it, which, again, I never will. And calling this new, untested, and sorely unwanted sandwich a “Columbia Classic” is absurdity of the worst kind.

While I am clearly the biggest victim here, the class of 2011 has also been victimized. They will never know the wild, sexy delirium of stumbling into your eatery on a Saturday morning, feeling like a truck had hit them, and saying those magic words at the sandwich counter: “Roast Beef Mexicali, extra chipotle, exactly 25 seconds in the microwave, chop-chop.” For that, I am truly sorry.

Therefore I insist that you bring back the old menu, even if it did list the California Griller, which was consumed by approximately nobody in the past three years. The too-regular consumption of the Mexicali was a glorious, exhilarating tradition of mine that should be shared by future Columbia students for the next five thousand years. Deny them this and you undoubtedly deny donations from future alumni. I know that I, personally, upon seeing the new menu, swore to withdraw my meaningless anticipated deathbed pledge of all the money in the world. I just couldn’t in good conscious leave such a considerable sum to a school that removed the one ray of light in this godforsaken world. Please do the right thing and appease me. At the very least, let this be a secret menu item.

You have 24 hours,

Eddie

The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in classics.