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Tasting Arby’s venison sandwichTasting Arby’s venison sandwich

And meeting the newest Meat Mountain

Bret Thorn, Senior Food Editor

March 3, 2017

3 Min Read
arby's
Bret Thorn

This is Arby’s venison sandwich. It’s made from 5 ounces of farm-raised New Zealand red tail deer (the top round and bottom round cuts), butterflied, marinated with garlic, salt and pepper, cooked in sous-vide and served on a toasted roll with fried onions and a Cabernet steak sauce infused with juniper. It costs $5, and you probably won’t be able to get your hands on it.

The Atlanta-based chain introduced it as an extremely limited limited-time offer last November, at just 17 locations in big hunting communities like Clio, Mich., and Leechburg, Pa., for four days per store or while supplies lasted, which sometimes was as little as 15 minutes, Arby’s senior vice president of communications, Chris Fuller, told me while Arby’s executive chef Neville Craw saw to my sandwich.  

Arby_s_venison_1_1.jpgNew York City is the next market to get the venison sandwich. A thousand of them will be available this Saturday at the chain’s new Madison Square Park location, which opened on Monday.

They were good enough to invite me to come and try it early.

The new Arby’s location is a big one — 3,500 square feet with a mezzanine with added seating and a large prep area in the basement, and when I got there at 1pm it had a substantial line of people.

Fuller said it had been like that since 10 a.m., with the line sometimes extending out the door.

Maybe there’s pent-up demand: This is just Arby’s second location on the island of Manhattan. There had been others previously but they all closed, and the chain’s only New York City location was in Queens until Arby’s opened a corporate store in Midtown.

This second one is also a corporate store.

At most of the locations where the venison sandwich was offered, just 500 of them were made available, and that wasn’t remotely enough to meet demand, Fuller said.

Arby_s_venison_2_1.jpgThe problem is that, although New Zealand’s venison industry is substantial and it provides the bulk of deer eaten in American restaurants, “They don’t make enough for America’s appetite,” Fuller said.

Indeed, according to Deer Industry New Zealand, the whole country only raises about one million deer total each year.

Considering that Arby’s sold 29 million sliders at its roughly 3,300 domestic locations in the first month that those things were available, a venison sandwich isn’t going to be a permanent addition, but Fuller said we can expect to see them popping up briefly from time to time.

Which is a good thing, because it’s a tasty sandwich: chewy but not tough, with just a mild deer flavor and a sauce reminiscent of a Worcestershire-based steak sauce with a tang that reminded me a little bit of Arby’s Sauce.

Craw wasn’t sure about that, and in re-tasting the Arby’s Sauce that I keep at my desk, he’s right; it’s a different tang. He said the Arby’s Sauce has a heavy dose of clove in it, whereas the venison sauce has juniper — a spice that he thought might be too snobby for Arby’s audience until he saw a recipe that used it in Field & Stream magazine and knew he was on the right track.

Although your chances of sampling the venison sandwich are slim, you can always order the Meat Mountain. An off-the-menu item containing all the meat varieties that Arby’s has at its restaurant. It’s $10, and I suggest that, if you order it, you tip it over, spread it out and serve it like a deli tray for a party of six.

Recently Arby’s upgraded the Meat Mountain by putting the fish in its fish sandwich on top.

That became available on March 1, also for $10, and on March 2 they sold at least six of them at the new Arby’s location.

Fuller said that they tend to be ordered in pairs, by two dudes challenging each other.

I doubt it’s a moneymaker, but Fuller didn’t seem to care about that.

“It’s the long-term value of the guest versus the per-sandwich value,” he said.

Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected]

Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary

About the Author

Bret Thorn

Senior Food Editor, Nation's Restaurant News

Senior Food & Beverage Editor

Bret Thorn is senior food & beverage editor for Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality for Informa’s Restaurants and Food Group, with responsibility for spotting and reporting on food and beverage trends across the country for both publications as well as guiding overall F&B coverage. 

He is the host of a podcast, In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn, which features interviews with chefs, food & beverage authorities and other experts in foodservice operations.

From 2005 to 2008 he also wrote the Kitchen Dish column for The New York Sun, covering restaurant openings and chefs’ career moves in New York City.

He joined Nation’s Restaurant News in 1999 after spending about five years in Thailand, where he wrote articles about business, banking and finance as well as restaurant reviews and food columns for Manager magazine and Asia Times newspaper. He joined Restaurant Hospitality’s staff in 2016 while retaining his position at NRN. 

A magna cum laude graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., with a bachelor’s degree in history, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Thorn also studied traditional French cooking at Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine in Paris. He spent his junior year of college in China, studying Chinese language, history and culture for a semester each at Nanjing University and Beijing University. While in Beijing, he also worked for ABC News during the protests and ultimate crackdown in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Thorn’s monthly column in Nation’s Restaurant News won the 2006 Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for best staff-written editorial or opinion column.

He served as president of the International Foodservice Editorial Council, or IFEC, in 2005.

Thorn wrote the entry on comfort food in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, 2nd edition, published in 2012. He also wrote a history of plated desserts for the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, published in 2015.

He was inducted into the Disciples d’Escoffier in 2014.

A Colorado native originally from Denver, Thorn lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Bret Thorn’s areas of expertise include food and beverage trends in restaurants, French cuisine, the cuisines of Asia in general and Thailand in particular, restaurant operations and service trends. 

Bret Thorn’s Experience: 

Nation’s Restaurant News, food & beverage editor, 1999-Present
New York Sun, columnist, 2005-2008 
Asia Times, sub editor, 1995-1997
Manager magazine, senior editor and restaurant critic, 1992-1997
ABC News, runner, May-July, 1989

Education:
Tufts University, BA in history, 1990
Peking University, studied Chinese language, spring, 1989
Nanjing University, studied Chinese language and culture, fall, 1988 
Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine, Cértificat Elémentaire, 1986

Email: [email protected]

Social Media:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bret-thorn-468b663/
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Twitter: @foodwriterdiary
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