Jets backup QB Tim Tebow received high marks for not turning today’s introductory press conference into a revival meeting or faith healing exhibition, but that doesn’t mean the 24 Year Old Virgin has escaped NYC criticism entirely.  Though it was widely reported this weekend that New York’s venerable Carnegie Deli would honor the Heisman winner with a menu item named “The Tim Tebow”, the Village Voice’s Robert Sietsema (or at least his headline writer) insists the sandwich in question, “sucks…probably on purpose.”

The thing weighs in at 3.3 pounds, and includes layers of roast beef, pastrami, corned beef, American cheese, lettuce, and sliced tomato. Oh, yeah, and it’s on white bread with mayo.

According to the Carnegie Deli, this is the first time they’ve ever used mayo and white bread on one of their sandwiches. The guy sitting next to me at the cramped table with his wife, both tourists from Denver, turned to me and said, “I grew up in the mountains with a family of 10, and we never had that much meat on the table for all of us.”

Since you can’t get a bite of the whole thing all at once in situ, I made a tiny sandwich with all the components. What a way to ruin good pastrami and corned beef! They were warm, but the roast beef was stone cold. The roast beef wasn’t even that good by itself. And the white bread, even though there were several puny slices of it, was inadequate to contain the greasy meat excesses, and soon there were little swatches of it littered around the plate like toilet paper in that horrible Charmin commercial with the pastel bears.

An insightful & entertaining food critic long before thousands of musicians/music writers  followed suit, Sietsema was a fixture in NYC’s criminally slept-on Mofungo. During that band’s heyday, it would’ve been hard to imagine New York rolling out the red carpet for the gridiron equivalent of Anita Bryant….but perhaps that’s an unfair comparison.  To Bryant, anyway. Surely she was more adept at throwing a forward pass.