05-05-2025
Menu Highlight: Mortadella is having a moment
One day, I looked up, and mortadella was everywhere.
It's always been on the menu at my go-to sandwich spots — Rocco's Italian Deli and La Pecora Nera — but soon, it was also a topping on local pizza specials. Then it was in a sandwich at the hip new 10-seat wine bar in one of the city's swankiest hotels.
It turned up in other cities. At bakeries and on cheese boards at fancy restaurants.
I became attuned to the deli meat's ubiquity, particularly in a town with a proclivity for corned beef.
The pink sheets of cured pork are fitting for sandwiches. On a spectrum of deli meats, mortadella sits somewhere between bologna and spiced ham. It's salty and sweet, buttery and herbaceous, and spotted with fat, pistachios and various spices.
Its balance in flavors makes mortadella perfect for layering with more pungent meats and bold ingredients, as in the muffaletta. The New Orleans staple sandwiches mortadella with saltier, more umami cured porks like salami and spicier varieties, such as capicola; a sharp tapenade and provolone between a round loaf of bread freckled with sesame seeds.
But no mortadella sandwich of recent memory compares to the Spicy Mortadella at Tall Trees Café, a soup, salad and sandwich shop opened by Mike Finsilver in Ferndale last year. The space is adjacent to the award-winning Secret Bakery, where it often sources from-scratch breads. Finsilver is a master sandwich-maker, having worked at local joints like Mudgie's and the sandwich-focused food truck he co-founded, Satellite.
The Spicy Mortadella allows the meat to shine on its own — no supporting cast, just ruffles of thinly sliced mortadella that eclipse a tough sesame seed semolina roll. Finsilver punches up the flavor with a Calabrian chili spread that stains the surface of the bread a shade of red-orange. Fresh herbs, namely parsley and dill, add depth to a crisp slaw of iceberg lettuce tossed in a creamy buttermilk dressing.
The sandwich is perfect. It's simple yet decadent at once. Paired with a crisp cabbage salad topped with slivers of pear and a coconut chai sweetened with raw carrot juice, it makes for a light but satisfying lunch meal on a warm, spring day.
Though mortadella is everywhere at the moment, the only place I want it is from a corner seat at Tall Trees Café.
817 Livernois Ave., Ferndale.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Tall Trees Cafe is the only place I want to eat a mortadella sandwich
