Among the world’s great sandwiches without a serious New York City presence, the roti john, like the one chef Amy Pryke serves at Native Noodles in Washington Heights, surely ranks near the top.
As one of the apocryphal origin stories of the dish goes, an Englishman in the late 1960s asked a Malay hawker in Singapore for a hamburger. The hawker didn’t have any burgers, so instead he fried together a concoction of minced mutton, eggs, and onions and pressed it into a baguette. And thus the roti john was supposedly born, a sandwich that Singaporeans often consume for breakfast. “John,” it should be noted, is a Southeast Asian slang term for a white man, as Pryke explains in John Wang’s cookbook anthology,