Blue Sky Deli sits at 2135 First Avenue, corner of 110th, and it does not close. Ever. The neighborhood calls it Hajji's. Ask three people behind that counter who invented the chopped cheese there in the nineties and you will get three answers, and not one of them mentions truffles.
THE WHOLE POINT WAS THE PRICE, WHICH IS THE PART EVERYBODY KEEPS QUIETLY EDITING OUT
The origin stories fight each other on the details. A cook ran out of burger buns and chopped the patties down to fit a hero. A cook had bad teeth and wanted something easier to get through. The manager, who is Yemeni, points home to dagha yamneeya, chopped meat and vegetables served with bread. Take your pick. They all land in the same spot. A big hot sandwich, priced under the thing sitting next to it on the board. First We Feast quoted a Harlem regular back in 2016 doing the arithmetic out loud: chopped cheese three fifty, Philly five dollars. That gap was the entire product.
THE UPCHARGE IS NOT A RECIPE CHANGE, IT IS A PRICE LEVER WEARING BETTER LIGHTING
Which brings us to 155 Prospect Park SW in Brooklyn. Prospect Park Deli posts its menu publicly, and that menu is the clearest document in this whole argument. Hot sandwiches: chopped cheese, eight dollars. Philly cheesesteak, eight dollars. Scroll up one section to the wagyu menu and the Classic Chopped Cheese is eighteen. Add bacon or hashbrowns, twenty.
Same grill. Same building. Same hands. Ten dollars for a word.
None of that is the deli's sin, and this is not a story about them. They are a family shop that found a margin the market was openly begging for, and they run it well. That is exactly the point. The upcharge works. That is why it is everywhere.
But look what the word did to the job. The chopped cheese was built to undercut the cheesesteak. On that menu the two now cost precisely the same, and the version pulling every camera runs more than double both.
A SUPERMARKET RAN IT FIRST, OFF A CART NAMED 1492, AND GOT ABSOLUTELY COOKED
December 2016. The Whole Foods at Columbus Circle put a chopped cheese out at eight dollars, roughly double the going bodega rate, from a kiosk branded 1492. Somebody sat in a room, looked at Columbus Circle, thought about Columbus, and approved it. Twitter needed about an afternoon.
That same season a butcher shop at 375 Amsterdam, up at 78th, ran an eleven dollar version at lunch on beef from a farm upstate. Critics liked it. It opened in October 2016. It closed in August 2018, short of two years.
THE MOST DECORATED VERSION IS OFF THE MENU AND THE BODEGA IS STILL WIDE OPEN
At Lincoln Center, Tatiana opened in 2022 with truffle chopped cheese buns. Bao, dry aged ribeye, smoked mozzarella and Taleggio, shaved truffle piled on top. Kwame Onwuachi grew up in the Bronx and was working his own material, which is a different act entirely from a supermarket doing it, and the dish earned its noise. Pull up the Tatiana menu right now. It is gone.
So, the scoreboard. Supermarket version, gone. Butcher shop version, gone with the shop. Most decorated restaurant version, off the menu. Hajji's is open at this exact moment. It was open when you started reading.
IT WAS NEVER A FIVE BOROUGH SANDWICH AND THE CORONATION IS PURE RETROFIT
Now the quieter problem. When the Times first covered this fight, it described the chopped cheese as a longtime staple of bodegas in Harlem and the Bronx. That is the actual footprint. Uptown Manhattan, the Heights, the South Bronx. Brooklyn and Queens picked it up later, mostly on the way up. Staten Island was never even in the room.
The five borough sandwich already exists and nobody argues about it, because there is nothing to argue over. The bacon egg and cheese is on every grill in every borough before seven in the morning, it costs what it costs, and nobody has ever needed to explain it to you.
Meanwhile the word keeps traveling without the sandwich attached. A Harlem born chopped cheese shop out in Los Angeles is opening in Atlanta this year. Philadelphia has one built on chapli kebab, ten ninety nine, launched in May. Fresno has one. North Augusta, South Carolina has one. Every one of those is somebody's real business and plenty of them are good.
But a sandwich whose whole argument was the price cannot be crowned by the people raising it. Put wagyu in it and you have built a burger with an alibi. The chopped cheese does not need a coronation. It needs eight dollars to hold.
HOW WE SOURCED THIS
Prices verified against the operators' own menus rather than delivery platforms, which carry marked up figures. Chopped cheese at eight dollars, Philly cheesesteak at eight dollars, and the wagyu Classic Chopped Cheese at eighteen are all posted on the Prospect Park Deli menu. The absence of a chopped cheese at Lincoln Center was confirmed against the current Tatiana menu.
Origin accounts and the Yemeni dagha yamneeya connection come from CBS New York and Cook's Country reporting on Blue Sky Deli. The three fifty against five dollars arithmetic comes from First We Feast, January 2016. The Columbus Circle kiosk and its eight dollar price were reported in December 2016. Opening and closing dates for the Amsterdam Avenue butcher shop come from Time Out New York and West Side Rag. The Philadelphia chapli kebab version and its ten ninety nine price were reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer in May 2026.
