Chinese roast pork on garlic bread is one of the great New York sandwiches, a taste of the highest peaks of Catskills cuisine: thin-sliced, Cantonese-style char siu married to Italian-American garlic bread beneath a veil of sweet-sticky duck sauce. Sandwich historians suggest that it was the creation of Herbie’s Restaurant in Loch Sheldrake in the 1950s, and it soon became a favorite of the summertime borscht-belt crowd — after-show entertainers and Jewish bungalow kids with observant parents lining up alongside one another for this taste of illicit exoticism, unkosher and delicious in the extreme. ‘‘It’s the ultimate assimilation crossover food,’’ the food writer, radio host and erstwhile restaurant critic Arthur Schwartz told me. ‘‘That sandwich is a symbol of acculturation.’’

Herbie’s roast-pork sandwich spawned imitators across the mountains and eventually in the middle-class Jewish diners of Brooklyn and along the South Shore of Nassau County, on Long Island. The children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the men and women who first ate the sandwich can eat it still. Chinese roast pork on garlic bread remains on the menus of the New Floridian in Brooklyn and Mitchell’s Diner in Oceanside. A few years back, the chef Ivan Orkin added a Japanese dimension at Ivan Ramen in Manhattan, serving it on a toasted miso-garlic hero and calling it the Herbie’s International. Court Street Grocers in Brooklyn and Manhattan serves Catskill Roast Pork, with housemade duck sauce.