Six Ways to Eat Chopped Cheese at a New Deli in Hell’s Kitchen

The chopped cheese sandwich reputedly had its origins in Bronx and East Harlem delis, and from there spread all over the city to sandwich shops, bistros, and even some decidedly upscale restaurants, like Tatiana in Lincoln Center, where the menu has offered a ribeye and taleggio chopped cheese heaped with shaved winter truffles.

In case you’ve been furtively eating under a bush the last decade, a chopped cheese is a hero sandwich made by chopping grilled hamburger patties with onions and American cheese as it cooks, until the components are roughly melded. Then the mass is shoveled onto a hero or kaiser roll along with tomatoes, lettuce, mayo, and ketchup, with the lettuce becoming hopelessly wilted (in a good way).

Now along comes the owner, Insaf Khriss, nicknamed Mazzy, a former Rutgers business school student and daughter of Moroccan immigrants. She opened Mazzy’s Chopped Cheese at 617 Ninth Avenue, near 44th Street, a little over a month ago, offering six types of chopped cheese sandwich priced from $9 to $17, or two dollars more if you have it made on a hero rather than a kaiser roll.

The Classy Way is the most basic of chopped cheese sandwiches: I took the hero route ($11), and the roll was bigger and softer than the kind you usually get in a deli, meaning two people could easily share it. And the meat was halal, as is all meat at Mazzy’s.

Another I tried was called Scotty’s Way ($13), and it was as if a BEC had mated with a chopped cheese, realizing they had the American cheese in common. The bacon was beef bacon, and the sandwich was not much of an improvement over the classic BEC.

The menu has a few Moroccan dishes, which is where the place really starts to get interesting. These include some over-rice plates featuring lamb kebab and kufta, soup, and at least one sandwich. That sandwich, made on a ciabatta roll (“It’s the bread I could find closest to Moroccan bread,” Mazzy tells me), features cumin-scented meatballs, a Moroccan salad of green olives and chopped vegetables, and French fries right in the sandwich. Oh my! When the green mayo something like chermoula is applied, the sandwich zooms into orbit, seething with herbs and fresh green chiles.

Two other things I dug: waffle fries in bewildering quantity heaped with cheddar, bacon, sour cream, and chives, and dubbed loaded pleasure ($8); and a glass of strawberry lemonade made on the spot and delivered tall, pink, and foamy. If ground meat heroes and Moroccan food is your thing, definitely stop by Mazzy’s sometime soon.