15 Must-Try Sandwiches from Around the World

Technically, the name of this Uruguayan favorite means “baby goat,” but it’s no baby, and contains no goat. Instead, it includes a slab of the star of Uruguay’s economy: beef. Expect to see it layered upon a toasted bun, slathered with mayonnaise, and stacked with tomato and lettuce—at minimum. If you want to take things a step further, get the sandwich with additional ingredients like sliced ham, melted provolone cheese, olives, and hard-boiled eggs, a version known as a completa. Dig into the sandwich when extra hungry, like after a long day of tourism or a walking tour of Montevideo.

São Paulo’s high-stacked sliced meat sandwich brings together the ingredients of immigrant communities that settled in the city. Italian-style mortadella, made locally, comes piled on top of Portuguese-style buns (ironically, they're known as French bread in the city).

Mayonnaise, Dijon mustard, and melted provolone round out the sandwich, but all in quantities dwarfed by the quantity of meat—supposedly stemming from the sandwich’s origins as a rebuttal to customer complaints about a market stand being too stingy with the sausage. The most famous version is still the one served in the Mercadão de São Paulo, and you can also try it on a food tour of the city.

One of the queens of the carb-on-carb genre, this snack-sized sandwich started as a street food in Mumbai, where it made a fast snack for workers pouring in and out of train stations. The fluffy, white Portuguese-style roll (pav or pao) cradles a fist-sized, crispy chickpea-flour potato fritter mashed with spices and peppers. A slathering of chutneys—sweet, green, and garlic—goes in, too.

It’s grown into the city’s quintessential street food, served everywhere and popular enough that McDonald’s even tried to imitate it. If you aren’t sure where to find the best one, consider a street food tour, during which a local guide can show you the best spots.

Editor's note: Travel to Israel may not be recommended due to the ongoing armed conflict and serious safety risks in this area. Please follow your government's guidance and travel advisories.

The key to this stuffed pita sandwich comes in the form of a spiced pickled mango spread, amba, that traveled with Baghdadi Jews from India to Iraq, then onto Israel. The fried eggplant sandwiches come dressed with hummus, amba, pickles, chopped tomato, and cucumber salad, and sometimes leftover cooked eggs from Shabbat, too.

These days, stalls all over Israel can barely keep up with the demand for the colorful, hearty vegetarian street food staple, which you can taste on a Tel Aviv food tour.

Soft, fluffy milk bread filled with creamy egg salad creates the ideal comfort food with its utter simplicity. Both the shokupan (bread) and the stuffing—made solely of umami-packed Japanese mayonnaise and hard-boiled eggs—are rich and tender, with no hard edges or sharp flavors, making it extremely easy to eat. It’s also easy to find, as this staple of Japan’s konbini, or convenience stores, is sold everywhere in the country. You could also take a food tour to get to know some of the country's best dishes.

Related: A Beginner's Guide to Japanese Convenience Stores (and What To Buy There)

French-style baguettes with shatteringly crisp outsides and soft, tender insides cradle the bright flavors of Vietnam in this complex sandwich. The bánh mì takes many forms, but most start with a smear of mayonnaise, a dab of Maggi sauce, and a pile of protein, usually a combination of tofu, ham, pork, beef, and chicken. It’s topped with herbs, spicy peppers, and sharp do chua (pickled daikon and carrots). A quick, affordable street food in Vietnam, bánh mì is also now a favorite in other parts of the world with Vietnamese communities, but your best bet is to bite into one on a street food tour of Hoi An.

This unique Trinidadian street food snack, served in the morning for breakfast or as a late-night treat for bargoers, uses turmeric-tinted flatbreads called bara to cradle a loose filling of doubles channa, the chickpea stew specific to the sandwich.

Everyone in Trinidad and Tobago customizes their doubles using the available condiments, which always include spicy pepper, sweet tamarind sauce, and kuchela, a green mango relish. Usually, there’s also cucumber chutney, coconut chutney, and a sauce made of chandon beni (cilantro) on hand for extra flavor.

New Orleans is a sandwich haven with a number of local favorites (including the muffuletta) but it’s the po’boy that stands out as representative of the city. It’s a seafood town, and the most common filling is that local bounty, usually in fried form (though the many variations also include roast beef with gravy). Long, crusty loaves of French bread do their best to hold together massive jumbles of protein, and most come “dressed,” meaning topped with tomatoes, shredded lettuce, pickles, hot sauce, and mayonnaise. Po’boys are served everywhere in New Orleans, but shops specializing in them (and getting fresh bread delivered multiple times each day) do it best. Dig into one on a NOLA food and history tour, along with other specialties such as gumbo and bananas foster.

Related: Don’t-Miss Dishes in New Orleans

Tortas are Mexico’s best-known sandwich, but the pambazo deserves the honor, marrying sandwich form with the technique used for a beloved dish, enchiladas. It’s easy to spot a stand selling this popular street food, as the bright red bread is usually lined up along the edge of a griddle, awaiting customers: The pambazo bun gets dunked in fire-engine red guajillo chile sauce and lightly fried, either before or after filling.

What goes inside varies by region, but favorites include potatoes, and either crumbled chorizo sausage or sliced ham, with a combination of fresh cheese, shredded lettuce, refried beans, and salsa as condiments. Take a food tour of Mexico City to try it and other dishes.

Though this lamb innards sandwich has many variations, the Turkish version sizzles as it rotates on the huge horizontal spit of wheeled carts, perfuming the air with the smell of cumin and fat spitting onto charcoal.

The chopped mix of intestine and sweetbreads, spiced with chilies and oregano, soaks into the soft bread and packs powerful flavor, the kind that lures in hungry crowds from the streets of Istanbul, especially late at night—indulge in one on an evening food tour.

A little, doughnut-like bread filled with the big flavor of Tunisia’s quintessential foods is sold on the street all over the country (it’s also a favorite in Israel). If you only know the French food called fricassé, forget what you might be picturing. This is entirely Tunisian, completely adorable, and has absolutely nothing to do with chicken stew—and you can taste it on a night food tour of Tunis.

But what is it? A deep-fried, oval-shaped yeasty roll that's split and stuffed with potatoes, tuna, and hard-boiled eggs. Black olives (and sometimes capers) bring brininess, while harissa spices all of it up.

This famous pork-stuffed flatbread sandwich from the Shaanxi capital, Xian, is sometimes compared to a hamburger or sloppy Joe, but the comparison is unfair to this full-bodied chopped-meat sandwich. Steamed, baked, or sometimes even fried round, flatbread gets split open and filled with braised pork, usually chopped to order with fistfuls of cilantro.

Anise, cumin, ginger, and other aromatics from the broth seep into the fluffy inside of the bread, while the meat always threatens to spill out the sides, making this a two-hander that needs to be scarfed quickly—as it often is on the streets of its hometown and in Beijing.

The people of Mauritius quietly created one of the world’s great sandwiches, even if it’s relatively unknown beyond the shores of the island nation. Though the name only implies that the griddled flatbread (roti) is served hot, what is actually hot inside the folded circle is the lima bean curry called gros pois, dressed with a bit of rougaille, the local tomato sauce, and an assortment of pickles and chutneys. Try it on a food tour in the capital city.

This madame is the same as the classic French sandwich croque monsieur, but with a few extra goodies that improve it. The monsieur is a grilled ham sandwich with melted gruyere cheese and luxurious mornay sauce, but Mrs. Crunch takes it up a notch with the addition of a fried egg on top. Both are staples of cafés and bistros in France, so have one for brunch to store up some energy before exploring a popular museum like the Louvre or taking a city tour of Paris.

This South African sandwich is rumored to take its name from how rich it is, and that over-the-top heft is what makes it ideal for feeding a group—it usually comes cut in quarters for easy sharing. The basic sandwich features a toasted, foot-long (30-centimeter-long) roll stuffed with bologna slices and French fries dressed with ketchup and piri piri sauce.

But rarely does it come this bare, more often than not featuring a pile of steak, chicken, or calamari, maybe some cheese and eggs, too, earning its name. It hails from the Cape Flats neighborhood of Cape Town and remains a signature of the area. Pick one up after riding around the city on a hop-on hop-off bus tour.