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Once, "Gourmet" Meant Something

Gourmet Sub Sandwich

This was the second straight exercise in sandwich name deception I feel victim to this week. This one was far less egregious and left me less rage-filled than yesterday’s offering. It came from a reliable gas station with overpriced gas.

The sandy consisted of Turkey, roast beef, ham and cheese (cheddar, I think, and another unspecified white cheese, maybe swiss?) on a hoagie bun. The turkey had a potent black pepper crust on its edges and looked a bit sketchy coloration-wise in parts. Roast beef was mostly high-quality, with a few tiny spots of gasoline-like iridescence. The ham was the iffiest — it was kind of blotchy in parts.

Part of me though the offcolored meat was a good sign; maybe this was real meat rather than the overly processed stepford-wives uniformity found with that circular deli meat you get in the circular hanging plastic meat containers by the American cheese singles at the supermercado.

The meat was stacked as follows: roast beef (dark brown and a little shiny), peppered turkey (pink to mauve with black edges) and ham (light pink with some dark pink. The cheeses were on the top. I think maybe the cheese was all just American cheese; the yellow kind as well as the white kind, seeing as the sandwicheers declined to identify them by specific name. If there’s a cheaper cheese than American besides those processed impostors that come in logs and cans and dollar-priced gallon-sized sacks, I’m happily unaware of it.

Highlights:
  • Peppery Turkey. Gave the sandwich spice, making mustard unnecessary. A desirable trait gived my office mustard shortage, which might have prevented me from enjoying the sandwich.
  • The hoagie bun (officially labeled: WHITE ROLL) was fresh and featured a spiffy splitting out effect from its top-middle.
  • I nuked the thing for a minute to melt the cheese and warm it from its recent mini-fridge stay, which was a good call on my part.
Meh:
  • The ham, roast beef and white cheese were blasted out of the sandwich waters by the overpowering (but tasty) yellow cheese and black pepper flavorings.
Bad:
  • Too salty, too greasy. These are not inherently bad traits — they do quite well for French fries, for example — but they did nothing to help the sandwich. I think the ham was to blame. As for the grease, melting the cheese only emphasized its presence, bringing shame to me and the sandwich.
Price:
  • $1.98 = a good deal, just as good as any of Subway’s offerings. The 6” Sweet Onion Teriyaki on Wheat I got at the newly opened fifth Subway franchise to open within about a mile of my office was a let down. And it cost literally dollars more than my Gourmet Sub Sandwich.
What hope is there in a world where a restaurant, albeit a sub-par fast-food restaurant, that specializes in submarine sandwiches can’t even compete with the local grocery store’s generic $2 imposter sub. Are we sandwich fanciers just living a big, collective lie?

Thankfully, no, everything is fine, pretty much.

I paired my Gourmet Sub Sandwich with a bag of Doritos Nacho Cheese flavored tortilla chips and a Sugar Free Rockst*r Energy Drink. I think real rock stars drink the kind with sugar, but whatever, it’s pretty clear I’m not a rock star (yet) so I have nothing to prove. I have little to say about these non-sandwich items, except that I just noticed Doritos has reverted back to calling its quasi-Mexi-cheese chips “Nacho Cheese,” after having renaming them “Nacho Cheesier” a few years ago. Has Cooler Ranch gone back to “Cool Ranch” again, too? If I weren’t incredibly lazy, I would go check the vending machine.

Anyway, good sandwich. It exceeded my low expectations and therefore earned itself three sandies out of a maximum five.

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