BY MEG VAN HUYGEN for WEEKLY VOLCANO | 7/17/2026
Slightly privileged rant incoming:
When you’ve been writing about restaurants for over half your life, you start to get a bee in your bonnet about fancy food. It becomes psychosomatically exhausting sometimes if you think about it too much. As the years wear on, you find yourself progressively veering toward simple food, classic food, unfuckwithed food, because then there’s no high-minded concept to first comprehend and then floridly describe to people. All the pretense, man. It gets old.
(Yes, contrary to popular belief, food writers almost always pay for their restaurant meals, which we do with cheerful aplomb! If this shit were free, well, I might have more patience.)
And hey, don’t get me wrong. Nixtamalized blackberries and sea kelp garum are delicious (er, trust me), and I’m lucky to have access to them. I just want a normal sandwich sometimes, you guys. Or some regular-ass, concept-free tacos or, like, pizza or fried chicken or shawarma. I get that we all live in a capitalist hell where every restaurateur is under pressure to come up with fresh new money-generating food ideas 24/7, but can we celebrate the basics too? We all gotta eat a couple times a day, right? It doesn’t need to be that deep.
With that said. Inside Real Art Tacoma, the all-ages punk/metal/goth venue at 56th and South Tacoma Way, there’s a small coffee shop called Beyond ThunderDome Café—its name a nod to the third film in the Mad Max series of Australian post-apocalyptic action movies—and it serves some pretty goddang good sandwiches. Normal sandwiches. Accessible and easy to comprehend, as the Earl of Sandwich intended them to be. I’m telling you this because people don’t seem to realize that it’s not just coffee service and that they’ve got sandwiches hiding in there.
The sandos are all thirteen bucks. They all have names from the Mad Max cinematic universe, and they’re big, substantial fellows. These sandwiches are not trying to impress you, and they’re full of pretty down-to-earth stuff that’s probably from Costco or the Grocery Outlet down the block. I like them because they taste good.
I also like that they are wrapped tidily in white butcher paper and bound with a little strip of masking tape, and I enjoy unfurling them at my office desk when I’m working late, like a meaty little birthday present that I bought for myself.
The one I usually get is the Lord Humungus. It’s a take on an East Coast grinder: ham, salami, pepperoni, provolone, lettuce, tomato, onion, and a house mayo that’s been enhanced with pickled cherry peppers, served cold. Diners can select their bread from among a bagel, a round roll, a “hero” (aka a hoagie roll), or a croissant, and I always get the hero. We’re talking Boar’s Head deli meats here—nothing acorn-fed or imported from Bavaria, but perfectly fine for regular folks like us. The Honda Accord of cold cuts. The Lord Humungus is generously mayonnaised, with sauce applied proportionately to the heft and height of one’s chosen bread, and the veggies are fresh and cronchy. I dig the little ting from the cherry peppers. And they put three kinds of pork on one sandwich, which pleases me most of all.
When it’s a little breezy out, I go for the Mad Max, a cover of a French dip with roast beef, cheese (the menu says American, but I’m pretty sure it came with melted cheddar last time), caramelized onions, and horseradish aioli on the same French roll, served warm with a cup of beefy jus for dippin’. The hero roll, obviously, is the move here too. The jus is almost definitely from a mix, with the Lipton-style rehydrated onions bobbing around in there, which I sorta love? It’s actually fitting that the vintage store across the foyer shares its vibe with the café, with ’70s and ’80s posters and books and invariably some episode of Starsky & Hutch or Hong Kong Phooey playing in the background—because it’s a very vintage 1970s feeling to eat this dippy old-school diner classic.
Like the domestic cold cuts in the Lord Humungus, the Mad Max’s roast beef isn’t from shade-grown, dolphin-safe artisanal cows, but it’s sufficiently raggedy and juicy and has some thickness to the cut. I’m sure it’s also from our friends at Boar’s Head. Also, there are a lot of sautéed onions in the world that are cosplaying as caramelized ones, but these onions are legitimately caramelized. Someone did the labor here.
I guess maybe these sandwiches are trying to impress us just a tiny bit with their flavored mayonnaises. That’s cool, though. It’s working!
Beyond ThunderDome Café’s menu also has a chicken version of the French dip, a turkey-and-bacon club-type thing, and a vegan sammie made with Field Roast and Chao slices. The other half of the menu is an assortment of breakfast sandwiches for $8 apiece: three meaty and three vegan. They’re all nice too. I always get the Ace, with egg, cheese, and sausage on a croissant, because of sausage. There’s not a loser in the bunch, though, tbh.
I realize that big sandwiches are having kind of a moment, both in Tacoma and Seattle (see also: Not Bad, Sliced, or MyPhilly, alongside classics like MSM and both Peterson Brothers’ joints). And look, I respect those magnificent sandwiches. They’re all intense, deeply delicious sandwiches with stunning, very specific bread. But because I am vast and contain multitudes, I also like Beyond ThunderDome’s metalhead sandwiches.
Among the many other things to like about Real Art Tacoma is its little thrift shop across the hall that’s stocked with vintage clothing—the bulk of which is menswear, unusually for vintage clothing shops!—and legacy media relics like VHS tapes and boom boxes. Like the sandwiches, it’s priced real affordably, and it excels at vintage sneakers and T-shirts in particular. Required browsing once you’re done sandwiching.
And stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Real Art Tacoma also hosts all-ages shows with live music almost every dang night of the week, and when it doesn’t, there are often chill-out events like Dungeons & Dragons night, open mic night, and movie-and-crafting night. There’s also a new-ish bar area in the stage room that’s cordoned off from the rest of the space, so that the shows can blessedly remain all-ages. This place is such a boon to Tacoma’s arts scene, and I’m always begging everyone to throw any extra money its way.
But yeah! Also sandwiches. Sometimes, a sandwich is just a sandwich. Beyond ThunderDome’s got ’em, and they’re good.
Beyond ThunderDome Café (inside Real Art Tacoma)
5412 S. Tacoma Way, Ste. B, Tacoma, WA 98409
