If Willy Wonka opened a sandwich shop, his menu might look a lot like the one at Timmy’s Brown Bag in Placerville. When asked about his favorite sandwich, proprietor Timothy Swischuk names the Tang BLT with Pop Rocks. You read that right: Tang-crusted bacon, heirloom tomato, Pop Rocks candy and Tang bacon aioli on brioche Texas toast.

“It has everything,” he says. “You have to have a really good tomato, and then the Tang really reinforces the tomato flavor. There’s this kind of combination of the real uppity high class … and then combining with the lowest pop culture kind of thing.”

If a chef’s perfect sandwich gives a clue to his personality, this one nails it with the perfect mix of intellect and fun.

Trained as an architect at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Swischuk worked in the firms of starchitects Frank Gehry and Richard Meier before spending 16 years teaching architecture at colleges ranging from Oregon to upstate New York to Texas.

At that point Swischuk was looking for a change. So when his son, Max (who was graduating high school) headed for the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, he decided to attend too. After graduation, they both moved to wine country to work in the culinary field. Timothy worked at an Italian restaurant in Yountville called Bottega, and then later ran a small cafe within an adjacent market. Restless again after about seven years, he began to search for a location to do something “small and simple.”

Sandwiches for tourists and for locals

He searched high and low for a location, and in 2016 he settled on Placerville, although he had no ties to the area beyond having driven through on his way to go fly fishing. He was looking for a small town, one that had the same mix of locals and tourists that his hometown of Galveston had, and he loved that the spot he found was literally on Main Street.

As for why he, with his culinary education, settled on sandwiches, he draws an architectural comparison. “When you teach architecture, the best project to give anybody is just a real simple house. Just design a house,” he says. “So with the restaurants, with food, you do that with a sandwich, because a sandwich is pretty basic, and at that point, then you can start to bring in all the cultural and informational mix.”

What he calls the “cultural and informational mix” translates into a menu of sandwiches that can be hard to wrap your mind around. When you first step up to the ordering window and see, say, enchilada suizas or pierogi, your brain will rebel and say, “Oh, only some of these are sandwiches.” But nope, they all are!

Here’s how he describes his process for getting to the right structure for the potsticker sandwich, in his charmingly colorful style. “So I was like, okay, I can get my hands on these pot stickers. I gotta do something with them, but I don’t want to make a pot sticker sandwich … just essentially putting the pot sticker eating event in the sandwich. I wanted it to have its root into something that’s, like, 180 degrees different, and so I’m saying to myself, ‘I need to make this pot sticker operate kind of on the realm of a cheeseburger.’ And then it was like, ‘Well, hey, I’ll just make a pot sticker cheeseburger.’ You take all the stuff as part of the pot sticker event and turn all those things into a cheeseburger event.”

Each trip to Timmy’s does seem like an event, including one recently where this reporter ate a thick, grilled cheese sandwich layered with tomato soup that had a crunch added by Cheetos and goldfish crackers, and talked to Swischuk’s son, Max, who mostly runs Timmy’s these days.

The yin to his yang

Max, tall and darkly bearded, is the stalwart, plainspoken ying to his madcap dad’s yang. Although classically trained as well, he prefers the term “people who cook food” to “chef,” and he likes his current gig due to its proximity to skiing and other “outdoorsy stuff.”

Lured up the hill by his dad in 2016 from Sogni Di Dolci cafe in Saint Helena, Max was at first simply a hired hand making sandwiches. He started to think he was leaving money on the table by closing at 3 p.m., especially because many Placerville restaurants don’t open until 5. Today, the restaurant is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday to Thursday and until 7 on Friday and Saturday. Max added burgers and tacos to the menu to serve the later crowd.

“I was gonna do what I want. Kind of like my dad. And I just like to make hamburgers, I make these tacos that are real good. We’ll just do those,” he says. “And it fit very well because our daytime menu is bizarre and different. At the nighttime there’s not as much tourist crowd … so the burgers and tacos just hit.” They’ve been such a hit that they are now on the menu full time.

Asked to describe the burger, Max says, “It’s very traditional, it’s just big.” It’s served on a brioche bun from Truckee Sourdough Company, which makes all the bread for Timmy’s.

Max also introduced some efficiencies, like making sure many of the sandwiches didn’t run out at the end of the day and batching the chicken to season and sauce after cooking.

Listening to Max describe the practicality of staffing and refrigerator space, and harkening back to Swischuk the elder’s rhapsodizing about the mashed-up WW2-era history of the German currywurst or how he hit on the idea of hashbrown patties in his vada pav curry sandwich, it’s clear that this father and son make a great team.

Asked about the future of Timmy’s Brown Bag, which has expanded its post-COVID opening times to seven days a week and past lunch to 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, Swischuk, like Max, is happy with where the shop is at, and not overly ambitious. “We’ve never really looked to expand because it’s entertaining enough just working in this little hole in the wall. And we kind of want to keep it a hole in the wall,” he says. “We can come up with a sandwich in the morning and serve it for lunch. … We like this small little avant-garde, nutty place.”

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