Every city has a sandwich. Philadelphia has that cheesesteak thing. Chicago's got the Italian beef. New Orleans has the po-boy, and I have made it my life's work, or at least my lunch's work, to eat one at every shop, corner grocery, gas station and seafood counter in Orleans Parish and the ones in Jefferson Parish that are close enough to count. My name is Andre, I'm 34, I work for the city (don't ask), and my lunch hour is an hour and fifteen minutes if nobody's watching.

The Pilgrimage started in February of 1997 when my cousin claimed the best roast beef po-boy in the city was at a place I'd never heard of in Gentilly, and I said no it's not, and it turned out neither of us could say for sure because neither of us had eaten at enough places. That seemed like a problem a man could fix. Two and a half years later the count is at 61 shops in 1999 alone and 140-something overall, my cholesterol is a closely guarded secret, and my cousin was wrong. (He was close, though. See Gentilly, below.)

Everything here is my own opinion, eaten on my own dime. No shop knows I'm coming. No shop knows who I am. Most of them are too busy to care.

Here's the story you'll hear from anybody in this town over the age of fifty, and I've got no reason to doubt it. In 1929 the streetcar workers of New Orleans went on strike. Two brothers named Bennie and Clovis Martin, who had been streetcar conductors themselves before they opened a coffee stand and restaurant, said they'd feed any striking man who came by, free, for as long as the strike lasted. When one of the strikers walked in the door, somebody in the kitchen would holler, "Here comes another poor boy!" And the sandwich they fed him, a big cheap one on a long loaf of French bread, took the name. Poor boy, po' boy, po-boy. Spell it how you like. I spell it with the hyphen because that's how the sign at my first shop spelled it and I'm loyal.

Whether every detail of that is gospel I can't tell you, but the Martin brothers were real, the strike was real, and the bread was real, and the bread is the whole thing. New Orleans French bread is not French bread from anywhere else: it's got a thin, crackly crust that shatters when you bite it and an inside that's mostly air. It goes stale in about six hours, which is why the good shops get it delivered every morning and why a po-boy from a shop that uses yesterday's bread is a crime against the city. I'll say it again below because it's the most important thing on this page: the bread is the whole thing.

• "Dressed." The big one. A dressed po-boy comes with lettuce, tomato, pickles and mayonnaise. If you don't want that, you say "undressed" or "nothing on it." If you want some of it, you say "dressed, no pickles" or whatever. Do not say "with everything." Everything is called dressed. This is the whole test.
• Sizes. Most shops sell by the length of the loaf. A "shorty" or half is six inches or so, a regular is a foot, and some places will sell you a whole loaf, which is a family event. Order the half. You can always get another half.
• The classics. Roast beef (slow-cooked, sliced or shredded, soaked in its own gravy; see debris, below). Fried shrimp and fried oyster (the seafood ones; "half and half" gets you both on one loaf). Hot sausage (a spicy patty, not a link, most places). Ham and turkey for the timid. Catfish, soft-shell crab in season, and French fry po-boys, which is exactly what it sounds like, with gravy, for a dollar and a half, and don't knock it.
• Hot sauce is on the table. Use it. Ketchup is also on the table; that's between you and your God.
• Get it to go if the line's long, but eat it in the car in the parking lot. The bread does not survive the ride home.

People from out of town see "roast beef debris" on a menu board and think somebody made a mistake. Nobody made a mistake. When you cook a big roast of beef for hours in a pot until it's falling apart, little pieces fall off into the gravy. Those little bits of beef swimming around in the drippings at the bottom of the pot, that's debris (say it the French way, DAY-bree, and if you say DEB-ris they'll know). It's the best part. A proper roast beef po-boy has sliced beef on it and then a ladle of gravy full of debris poured over the top, and a proper roast beef debris po-boy is just the debris, and either way you're going to need both hands and the whole stack of napkins, which brings me to the scale.

Every po-boy gets three scores, one to five each, for a possible 15.

I can't put all 61 up here or this page would take an hour to load on my modem, so here are the ones people ask about, by neighborhood. The full notebook is in the glove compartment of my truck, and if you e-mail me about a specific shop I'll look it up.

Roast beef is the king but fried shrimp is what people ask me about most, especially in the summer. Rules for a great one: small-to-medium Gulf shrimp (big ones are showing off and they don't fit), fried to order in a light crisp coating, enough of them that they fall out when you pick it up, and bread that's been given a minute in the toaster so the mayo doesn't sog it. Out of the 22 fried shrimp po-boys I ate in 1999, the top five:

1. Pelican Po-Boys (Uptown). Crisp under the mayo. I've thought about this for weeks.
2. Broadmoor Corner Store (Broadmoor). The cat gets no credit.
3. Gentilly Seafood & Deli (Gentilly). Same people who do the debris. They can fry, too.
4. Duplantier's (Irish Channel). Better at oysters, still very good at shrimp.
5. A gas station on Chef Menteur Highway whose name I did not write down and which I have been unable to find again. If you know it, e-mail me. I'm serious. This is keeping me up nights.

Goal for the year is 75. Goal for life is all of them. If you've got a shop you think I've missed, especially the kind with a counter in the back of a grocery and a hand-lettered sign, tell me. Put the neighborhood in the subject line. I keep the e-mails in the notebook.