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Grinders and grinders, grinders and grinders

It’s What’s Between has finally arrived in the vaunted East, only to discover a dearth of well-paying sandwich review jobs. Therefore, we've set up in delightfully affordable Plainville, Conn. while we continue our hunt for blog funding.

Although far from the sandytopia that is our eventual destination — New York City — central Connecticut has no shortage of sandwiches. The sandies are different here. Gone are the Quiznos of our former Colorado HQ. In their place are D’Angelos, which we remember fondly from our year of sandwich-eating in Boston following the turn of the century. D’Angelo is best known, to us anyway, for their reliable hot pastrami subs (grinders) and wildly short-sighted production of zillions of plastic Drew Bledsoe promotional giveaways a few months before the Patriots' first of many Super Bowl victories. Readers may recall it was not Drew Bledsoe, but rather TV's Tom Brady who would lead the Pats to NFL dominance, this year's humiliating failure excepted.

But why are we discussing football on a sandyblog? Seriously, why?



We should be talking about grinders. Many had long assumed grinders were nothing more than a figment of Adam Sandler’s imagination; a silly-sounding made-up sandwich in his 1993 hit recording “Hoagies and Grinders (The Sandwich Song).” But they were wrong … dead wrong. Grinders are terribly real and Connecticuters freaking love them. You literally can’t walk five feet here without some guy trying to sell you a grinder and a cup of Dunkin’. As you can see in the picture, even non-sandwich restaurants must advertise that they do, in fact, also sell grinders. If not, they would go out of business, as potential customers would simply go down the street to a different Chinese restaurant and get their grinder there. Bonus game: can you spot all four instances of the words grind or grinding in the picture? There’s even a fifth one out of frame!

So what is a grinder? It’s just another name for a sub, apparently. We ate one at a pizza place (not the one pictured) and it could only be described as “a long sandwich.” We will eat more, as there’s little else to eat here, and maybe we'll review one if we get off our lazy, History Channel-watching asses and walk over to the other chair that's in front of the computer.

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