New York Times, Tuesday, September 10, 2019

I've had hundreds of BLTs in my life, but I've never thought about the order of ingredients. Does it matter? Seems like it should — it'd be weird if someone described our nation's flag as the good old white, blue, and red, yeah?

Only one way to find out! Now I have to figure out which deli will give me the least side-eye when I order six different BLTs, using the six different permutations.

Great theme phrases. I LOVED TO BITS every single one of them, LOWER BACK TATTOO a great find for LBT. It's not as colorful a term as the more well-known one, but sadly, T S (warning, hilarious but NSFW!) doesn't fit in a B L T permutation theme.

I also appreciated how careful Ethan was to avoid duplicating any one word. It'd be all too easy to use TO or TOO twice. That attention to detail made the theme set stand out even more.

Five themers aren't easy to work into a 15x15 grid, especially when they're fairly long. If this had been a meatier theme, one that could have run on a Wednesday, I'd have given it more passes. For a newb, though, seeing ALBEE VERDI ULTA KVELL EPOCHAL might elicit a sensation of THIS LOOKS BAD.

All of these words are fair game, entries that educated NYT solvers ought to be (at least vaguely) familiar with. As a whole, though, they might take away from a victorious finish. As a constructor, you want to deliver a shout of "I DID IT!" instead of an "uh … I think I might have kinda sorta maybe finished?"

Black squares divided the grid into two halves, upper and lower. I'd have asked Ethan to rework, creating openings somewhere along that black diagonal. It'd be one thing if you could only have good grid flow or clean fill, but I'm positive that with this theme set, you can have both.

I'd have loved some rationale behind permuting the B L T letters — there are dozens of words indicating anagramming, so I'm sure there's some food-anagramming revealer out there — but overall, the snazziness of the five themers made up for that omission.