92 SERRANITO: serrano ham, BBQ Pulled pork, manchego cheese and brava sauce

Wait a minute. Brava sauce? Brava sauce? You mean to tell me, 100 Montaditos, that this was a potential montadito condiment and you didn't bother to use more than once, and then 92 percent of the way through the menu?

And even then, that spicy sauce is kind of wasted on a sandwich that contains an already-sauced component in the pulled pork. Still, this is a good sandwich. The sauce doesn't become apparent until the end, but when it does, it's clear that keeping it from us all this time was a big mistake.

Montaditos down: 92
Montaditos to go: 8
Next: 93 PHILLY STEAK CLUB: philly steak, fresh tomato, lettuce and chipotlealioli

91 CAPRESSE: serrano ham, mozzarella, fresh tomato and pesto

I've had my issues with the Serrano ham before, and you know my history with pesto, but this is a darn good sandwich. It's a darn good Italian sandwich, as the name suggests, with its mozzarella cheese and ciabatta (might as well call the Serrano ham prosciutto di Parma and roll with it), but darn good nonetheless.

This may well be your best bet in the ham department.

Montaditos down: 91
Montaditos to go: 9
Next: 92 SERRANITO: serrano ham, BBQ Pulled pork, manchego cheese and brava sauce

90 TRALARÍ: serrano ham, garlic pork loin and green pepper

The garlic pork loin, I'm afraid, is always going to be a tough sell for me. This sandwich also suffered from the construction problem I've mentioned before -- its best moments were at the back, where I found the probably-too-small piece of Serrano ham.

Montaditos down: 90
Montaditos to go: 10
Next: 91 CAPRESSE: serrano ham, mozzarella, fresh tomato and pesto

80 Anchovies,manchego cheese, piquillo pepper, arugula and mayo

Mercifully, the menu has run out of anchovies. If you have to eat an anchovy sandwich*, this is one of the better ones. The manchego helps.

*You don't have to eat an anchovy sandwich. It's in the Geneva Conventions.

Montaditos down: 80
Montaditos to go: 20
Next: 81 HISPANO: tuna, piquillo pepper, hard boiled egg and mayo

79 Anchovies, brie cheese, piquillo pepper and arugula

If there's one ingredient in which I'd invest some hope in taming the mighty anchovy, it's my new friend brie. Unfortunately, I did not get to fully test this hypothesis. The sandwich I was served contained some brie (it's at the right), but most of its cheese was goat cheese, in pearled-crumble form, as the photo shows. (Maybe they ran out of brie and compensated with the chevre?)

I guess I did get my wish of another sandwich with goat cheese.

For the record, this No. 79-with-an-asterisk was better than the previous anchovy sandwiches, though it was still an anchovy sandwich.

Montaditos down: 79
Montaditos to go: 21
Next: 80 Anchovies, manchego cheese, piquillo pepper, arugula and mayo

78 Anchovies, fresh tomato, hard boiled egg and mayo

To the extent that I'll take whatever I can get in terms of diluting the powerful saltiness of the anchovies, No. 78 with its hard-boiled egg is marginally better than No. 77 with its pickles. Suffice it to say, however, that I will not be ordering anchovy montaditos once my tour of 100 is done.

Montaditos down: 78
Montaditos to go: 22
Next: 79 Anchovies, brie cheese, piquillo pepper and arugula

77 Anchovies, fresh tomato, mayo and pepinillo

This is an anchovy sandwich. There's no sugarcoating that. And I hope I never have to taste a sugar-coated anchovy.

Was there pepinillo there? Looks more like green pepper in the picture. Doesn't matter. All I tasted was anchovies. And although I'm pretty open-minded about anchovies, unlike your stereotypical takeout-pizza orderer, anchovies should not the main ingredient on a sandwich.

Montaditos down: 77
Montaditos to go: 23
Next: 78 Anchovies, fresh tomato, hard boiled egg and mayo

76 Smoked salmon, cream cheese, fresh tomato and arugula

The final montadito in the smoked-salmon section, with tomato added to the No. 71 template, is probably the truest to the Jewish-deli tradition. And it's good. Again, with the delightful exception of No. 75, I'm not likely to order smoked salmon on a montadito, but if you're in a bagel-and-lox mood and your dining companion insisted on this Spanish place instead of a Jewish deli, order this one.

Montaditos down: 76
Montaditos to go: 24
Next: 77 Anchovies, fresh tomato,mayo and pepinillo

75 Smoked salmon, blue cheese, crispy onion and honey mustard

Wow. That was really good. Maybe it was my high level of hunger, maybe my low expectations (approaching no expectations), probably a combination of the two.

Or maybe it was the inspired combination of ingredients. I've sighed and eye-rolled through the too-long section of the 100 Montaditos menu devoted to smoked salmon. Yeah, yeah, I know what lox and cream cheese on a white baked good tastes like. And I know where to get a better version. But then you take away the cream cheese and I'm all WTH?

The addition of blue cheese on No. 74 did little or nothing for me. But something about throwing in the crispy onion and honey mustard puts the smoked salmon and the blue cheese in just the right contexts. (I guess I have observed the surprise affinity between blue cheese and honey mustard.) This may well be a wild-card entry in the season-ending championship tournament.

Montaditos down: 75
Montaditos to go: 25
Next: 76 Smoked salmon, cream cheese, fresh tomato and arugula

74 Smoked salmon, blue cheese, arugula and olive oil

Wait a minute. Olive oil? That was an option all along, and yet we're seeing it for the first time here at No. 74? One could argue that every one of these montaditos, or at least those without a competing condimental spread, should have olive oil.

Having said that, I have to admit that I messed up and jotted down the wrong numbers and had to come up with the next three on the fly and failed in my quantum-theory method and ended up with two smoked-salmon sandwiches in the same lunch. I was flustered, I didn't look at the menu to confirm what I was eating, and I didn't notice any olive oil. It may have been there, but I wasn't looking for it and I didn't notice it. I noticed blue cheese. Hard to miss blue cheese. And it wasn't as weird with smoked salmon as you might think.

This is not an order I would have repeated, but I may have to repeat it in the name of journalistic integrity.

Montaditos down: 74
Montaditos to go: 26
Next: 75 Smoked salmon, blue cheese, crispy onion and honey mustard

73 Smoked salmon, cream cheese, piquillo pepper and arugula

Again I'm wondering about the editing of this menu. The piquillo pepper is not a bad addition to No. 71, but it's the only difference between this and No. 71. For the record, I like this one a little better. Precisely one slice of piquillo pepper's worth of better.

Montaditos down: 73
Montaditos to go: 27
Next: 74 Smoked salmon, blue cheese, arugula and olive oil

72 Smoked salmon, hard boiled egg, lettuce and mayo

Smoked salmon without cream cheese was less different from smoked salmon with cream cheese than I would have thought. If I have a choice, though, I'll take cream cheese with my smoked salmon.

Montaditos down: 72
Montaditos to go: 28
Next: 73 Smoked salmon, cream cheese, piquillo pepper and arugula

71 Smoked salmon, cream cheese and arugula

And now for the Jewish-deli portion of the 100 Montaditos menu! Sure enough, it's a bagel with lox and cream cheese, only instead of a bagel you have some pretty decent crusty bread. Instead of onion, capers and tomato you have ... arugula. It's not bad, but I don't see many New Yorkers ordering this.

Montaditos down: 71
Montaditos to go: 29
Next: 72 Smoked salmon, hard boiled egg, lettuce and mayo

70 Goat cheese, fresh tomato, lettuce and anchovies

This sandwich is so odd, I couldn't even get an in-focus picture of it. Well, at least the idea is weird. I love goat cheese. Love it. The goatier the better. And so when I saw that 100 Montaditos used goat cheese on only two sandwiches and put anchovies on one of them -- the only one in the regular-bread collection -- I scratched my head. What a missed opportunity for a great ingredient.

If you don't like anchovies, there you go. If you like anchovies, you might still acknowledge their ability to overwhelm other ingredients and wonder why they would be coupled with the more delicate delicacy that is the cheese of the goat.

I can't say I disliked this montadito. There was something illicitly satisfying in enjoying two outlaw ingredients at once. Still, it would be nice if goat cheese got a chance to shine in some other sandwiches, with less-assertive partners.

Montaditos down: 70
Montaditos to go: 30
Next: 71 Smoked salmon, cream cheese and arugula

69 Brie cheese, arugula, crispy onion and honey mustard

I am on record as approving of brie on 100 Montaditos montaditos, and No. 69 is no exception. Arugula, crispy onion, honey mustard and whole-grain bread probably isn't a combination I would have come up with, but it's pretty good. You could do worse for a meatless lunch.

Montaditos down: 69

Montaditos to go: 31

Next: 70 Goat cheese, fresh tomato, lettuce and anchovies

68 Brie cheese, bacon and green pepper

Brie may be the main ingredient here, but this is one unapologetically bacony bacon sandwich of bacon.

Did I mention there was bacon?

I have complained on a few occasions of 100 Montaditos montaditos promising bacon and delivering either scant bacon or undetectable bacon, but there is no doubt that there is bacon here. Along with the brie, my new favorite thing, it reminds me of ... something. I'll think of it someday. It's good, but it's a departure. If you like bacon, it's, I dunno, how would H. Ross Perot put it? Like a hula girl in a NASCAR pit crew on bobblehead night. Yeah, that's it.

Montaditos down: 68
Montaditos to go: 32
Next: 69 Brie cheese, arugula, crispy onion and honey mustard

67 Manchego cheese, chorizo and green pepper

I know I've been carping about the omnipresence of the green bell pepper lately, but, man, this is a heck of a montadito. No. 56 turned me off somehow with the seminal ingredients manchego and chorizo alone, but No. 58 gave me strong second thoughts by adding tomato and arugula, and now No. 67, different from No. 56 solely in its use of green pepper, strikes me as a classic. Sometimes in ingredients there is an alchemy.

Montaditos down: 67
Montaditos to go: 33
Next: 68 Brie cheese, bacon and green pepper

66 Manchego cheese, fresh tomato, green pepper and anchovies

Kind of sneaked that last ingredient in there, didn't you, 100 Montaditos?

I would have gone in another direction. The introduction of manchego cheese as a main ingredient would seem to call for less-flamboyant accompaniments, perhaps a vegetarian celebration, but there it is, anchovies, and you certainly do taste anchovies.

This part of the menu, or at least my recent quantum-physics-based orders, seem to have landed me in a deep well of green bell peppers, as in an inexpertly tossed salad, but in this case I welcome my Capsicum annuum overlords. That crispy green bite helps put the anchovies in their place.

This isn't a great montadito, but it's better than it might sound.

Montaditos down: 66
Montaditos to go: 34
Next: 67 Manchego cheese, chorizo and green pepper

65 Serrano ham, mozzarella and pesto

If you've read all my previous posts, and of course you have, you know my history with pesto. I don't particularly care for pesto.

So I don't know if there's something that just clicks with this combination, or whether it was a particularly judicious application of said substance, or whether I'm just in a good mood, but I kind of liked the pesto on this sandwich. Creamy mozzarella with that salty ham is a natural, and the green stuff adds just the right background note.

Montaditos down: 65
Montaditos to go: 35
Next: 66 Manchego cheese, fresh tomato, green pepper and anchovies

64 Serrano ham and fresh tomato (whole-grain bread)

Serrano ham and tomato could describe a Spanish sandwich even more classic than Serrano ham alone, or Serrano ham with manchego cheese. But montadito No. 64 steps back a bit from that lofty perch. There's the whole-grain bread, for one thing. Good, but not classic.

And then there's the form the tomato takes. A typical ham sandwich in Spain would include some tomato pulp, in the form of whatever sticks to the bread when the sandwich artist cuts a tomato in half and rubs it on said bread. Rub a little harder, and maybe add some garlic and olive oil*, and you have pan con tomate, tomato bread, so simple and yet one of the best things this world has to offer.

Anyway, this is close to a classic sandwich but not quite. And let's be honest: As with all the Serrano-ham sandwiches, it's good if you're in the mood for salt, not so good if you're not.

*How is olive oil not an ingredient on any of these montaditos? I'm just saying.

Montaditos down: 64
Montaditos to go: 36
Next: 65 Serrano ham, mozzarella and pesto