Sandwich inflation: the chopped cheese rose $5.49 at its birthplace and only $1.14 was inflation

Hajji's sits at 2135 First Avenue, on the corner of East 110th Street, under whichever awning is hanging this year: Blue Sky Deli, Harlem Taste, or the one that just says chopped cheese. It is open around the clock. The griddle is in the back, and the sandwich that comes off it, a burger patty chopped with onions and American cheese and folded into a hero, is the one the whole city has been arguing about for ten years. In January 2016 it cost $3.50. By June 2024 a customer paid $8.99. That is a rise of $5.49, and $1.14 of it is inflation. The other $4.35 is something else, and twelve blocks below 14th Street a Pakistani restaurant adds $11.80 more on top.

The people who work at Hajji's have told the same story to the New York Times, to Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown and to Tasting Table: the sandwich was Carlos Soto's. He was a Dominican cook who ran the griddle for more than twenty years and died in 2014. The deli is Yemeni-run; its manager in 2016, Salah Alhubaishi, was the one who told reporters about Soto. There are competing versions of why the sandwich happened, from a shortage of round buns to a Yemeni dish called dagha yamneeya that Soto adapted, and the Bronx, Washington Heights and Queens all have delis that claim a piece of it. First We Feast, which had called Hajji's the generally agreed birthplace in January 2016, released a documentary that November, Hometown Hero: The Legend of New York's Chopped Cheese, and the sandwich stopped belonging to a neighborhood.

A bodega does not publish a price history, so the record of what Hajji's charged comes from the people who ate there and wrote it down. First We Feast printed $3.50 in January 2016. One Tripadvisor regular logged $4.25 in April 2017, $5 that June, $6 in June 2021, $6.50 in May 2022 and $8 in May 2023. The Curious Uptowner paid $8.99 in June 2024 and noted the 24-hour sign. The Fordham Ram found $4 to $4.50 in 2019. Seven increases in the record, about 65 cents a year, and no year in which the price came down.

Run it against the dollar and the shape of the thing is clear. Between January 2016 and June 2024 the federal consumer price index rose 32.6 percent. The chopped cheese rose 156.9 percent. A sandwich that merely kept pace with ordinary inflation would cost $4.64 today; the one at the counter costs $8.99. The sandwich compounded at 11.9 percent a year while the dollar compounded at 3.4 percent, which means the price increase ran at nearly five times the rate of general inflation. This is the part worth naming. Sandwich inflation is its own number, it is bigger than the one in the headlines, and it is the number a customer at 110th and First has actually been paying.

The causes are not a mystery and they are not the bodega's doing. Ground beef hit $6.90 a pound in April, a record on the federal series, the national herd is at a 75-year low, and a lease on First Avenue in a community district the city's own profile classes as gentrifying does not get cheaper because the sandwich is famous. The point is not that Hajji's raised the price. It is that $8.99 at the source is what the sandwich now costs to make and sell on that corner, and everything above it is something else.

The markup started the same year the documentary did. In December 2016 Whole Foods at Columbus Circle sold a chopped cheese from a cart for $8, roughly double the bodega price, and DNAinfo wrote the gentrification story in a week. White Gold, April Bloomfield and Ken Friedman's Upper West Side butcher shop, announced a version at $15 and opened it at $11.

Put those numbers through the same index and the decade turns itself inside out. That $8 cart sandwich, the one that got called gentrification in print, is $10.41 in June 2024 money. Hajji's own price that month was $8.99. The 2016 scandal was more expensive, in real terms, than the original is now. White Gold's $11 comes out at $14.31. What looked in 2016 like a sandwich being taken uptown-to-downtown at double the price now reads as an early and relatively modest version of the same move, and the market has gone well past it.

Nishaan, at 160 First Avenue in the East Village, is a Pakistani kitchen from Zeeshan Bakhrani that Hell Gate covered last year for its chapli kabob chopped cheese; its own menu lists that at $16.63 and a lamb chopped cheese at $20.79, which is 85 and 131 percent above the source. Compton's in Greenpoint is reported at $15, six dollars over. Shmackwich, a Brooklyn crew, sells a wagyu version at $25, sixteen dollars over. Bodega City, Jeremy Batista's counter on Havemeyer Street in Williamsburg, holds the original at $9, and Bodega Truck at $9 too, which is the useful control: a Brooklyn counter can still sell this sandwich at the East Harlem price. It has reached the ballpark, where Citi Field's 2026 menu added a chopped cheese patty on coco bread at Chef Kwame's Patty Palace in section 415, with no price published. Harlem Shake, the Lenox Avenue burger counter that trades on the neighborhood's name, does not have one on its menu at all. The sandwich is now everywhere except, on most menus, the word Harlem.

The $20.79 breaks into four parts and they add up exactly. $3.50 is what the sandwich cost in January 2016. $1.14 is ordinary inflation, the part any price in America picked up over those eight years. $4.35 is what the source added beyond inflation, which is beef at a record and a lease on First Avenue. And $11.80 is the East Village. Three dollars fifty, a dollar fourteen, four thirty-five, eleven eighty. That is the whole receipt.

One honest caveat on that last column: Nishaan's $20.79 version is lamb, not beef, and lamb from a kabob house is a real upgrade at a real cost, so some of the $11.80 is food rather than room. The chapli kabob version at $16.63 narrows it to $7.64 and the like-for-like beef comparisons are cleaner still, Compton's at six dollars over and Bodega City at nothing over at all.

What the rest of it buys is not beef. A dining room instead of a counter. A server instead of a guy with a spatula who also sells lottery tickets. A lease below 14th Street instead of one at 110th. A printed menu, a Resy page, a name. Nishaan is not cheating anyone; a kabob chopped cheese in a sit-down room is a different product at a fair price for what it is. The thing to understand is that the price difference is the room, not the sandwich, and the room is what you are paying for when you pay $21.

Disclosure: We Eat Here runs Harlem Summer Nights in West Harlem. Hajji's has never been a vendor at any of our events, and none of the operators named here appears on our rosters.

Every figure above is in June 2024 dollars, because June 2024 is the last time anyone wrote down what Hajji's charges. The original is still around nine dollars on a corner that the city's data calls gentrifying, in a deli that stays open all night, made the way Carlos Soto made it. If you want to know what the chopped cheese costs, that is the number. Everything else is the price of eating it somewhere else.

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