Sometimes things that feel normal when you see people casually doing them on the internet turn out to be nerve-wracking when you try them in the real world, like bleaching your eyebrows or walking backwards on a treadmill.
Add to the list: ordering a chopped cheese “the ocky way” at a deli in Raleigh, as I found myself attempting to do last week.
I first learned of the chopped cheese—a New York bodega staple of beef and melted cheese on a hero roll—a decade ago during the golden age of YouTube restaurant journalism, when publications were regularly sending reporters out to interview cooks and regulars at big city holes-in-the-wall. (Since the pandemic, the landscape has skewed more toward solo influencers ranking fast-food burgers in their cars.)
In recent years, the sandwich has seen a resurgence on TikTok, with most videos involving someone ordering one “the ocky way.” I looked the phrase up once: it comes from the Arabic word for brother, akhi, and implies that the person behind the grill makes it the way they would for their brother. I’d always wanted to try a chopped cheese—and to order it the ocky way—but they’re hard to come by around here. So when I heard about Grill & Go Deli, a self-described NYC-style bodega near NC State’s campus with a chopped cheese on the menu, off I went.
The place is serious about New York; there’s a giant subway map on one wall and, on another, a mural of skyscrapers with a wildly out-of-scale Statue of Liberty looming over them like Godzilla. Even the deli’s hours—8 a.m. to 3 a.m.—feel like a nod to the city that never sleeps.
When I arrive, I spend some time studying the menu while I psych myself up to order.
Beyond the chopped cheese, Grill & Go offers a range of other hot hoagie-style sandwiches (including a vegan chopped cheese), cold cut sandwiches, halal platters, gyros, burgers, paninis, quesadillas, and salads. Most items run between $9 and $15. There’s also an all-day breakfast menu, a coffee bar, a juice bar, a dessert case full of cake slices and macarons, over 50 different bottled drinks, chips, and imported chocolate bars.
Eventually, I can’t justify lingering any longer. I walk up to the register and ask for a chopped cheese, the ocky way.
The cashier, a woman in a bright-colored dress, immediately bursts out laughing. My face goes hot. I have used a phrase from the internet in a real-life establishment and the person behind the counter is laughing at me. Then, miraculously, she nods her head. Yes, she says.
I’m elated. I add on a bottle of water for 99 cents, bringing my total with tax and tip to $14.27.
A few minutes later, the cashier walks a foil-wrapped sandwich over to my seat at the window. I ask her what, exactly, makes it the ocky way.
“You just have to try it,” she says, making a motion that’s somewhere between a shrug and shaking her head.
I unwrap the foil, then the wax paper beneath it, and take a bite. There’s a lot going on. The bread is toasted and spread with ketchup and mayo; inside, chopped beef mingles with lettuce, tomato, green pepper, and onion. Melted cheese binds everything together, and there’s a rich tomato sauce running through it that pushes the whole thing toward Sloppy Joe territory.
It’s scrumptious. But I’m hung up on what separates this from the regular chopped cheese. It’s like I’m looking at a shampoo bottle that says “40% more volume” without saying 40% more than what.
So I order another chopped cheese to-go—“just a normal one,” I tell the cashier.
Back in my car, I inspect the second sandwich. It looks identical to the first. It tastes the same, too. There’s a chance the cashier didn’t understand that “just a normal one” meant “not the ocky way.” There’s also a chance that there is no such thing as the ocky way at Grill & Go, and she was just being nice.
The only way to know for sure, I decide, is to go back the next day wearing a disguise. I show up in a face mask and a hat, in case it’s the same cashier and she recognizes me and tells the cook to make it the ocky way again. This turns out to be unnecessary; a different person is behind the register. I order the chopped cheese and wait.
Once the sandwich is in my possession, I ask today’s cashier what he knows about the ocky way. Like his colleague the day before, he laughs.
“It’s an internet trend one guy made up, where he puts a bunch of random toppings on the sandwich,” he says.
That’s a different definition than the one I’d been working with. In my car, I pull up Google and see that the cashier was referencing a Brooklyn cook, “General Ock,” who went viral in 2021 for piling sandwiches with whatever customers brought to him: mozzarella sticks, lobster chunks, Doritos. The concept of ordering something the ocky way has been part of bodega culture for years, but beyond New York, the phrase is mostly synonymous with General Ock’s version, where you tell the person behind the counter what you want on it.
Well then. Yesterday’s cashier was almost certainly just humoring me.
But then I try today’s sandwich. Something is definitely different. Fundamentals are tweaked: much less sauce, no green pepper, closer to a straight-up burger flavor profile than the rich, tomato-y creation I’d gotten the first time around. It’s good, but it doesn’t have quite as much love in it.
I wipe my hands on the wax paper and start the car. Next up: eyebrow bleach.
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