THE GUARDIAN – I’ve been eating Subway sandwiches for a quarter of a century. Mainly out of habit.
2001 Subway was something else: booth seating, ceiling fans with gold trim, leafy green house plants, faux brick and black-and-white New York cityscape wallpaper with a repeating Empire State Building frieze. Ahh.
My go-to back then was a foot-long turkey sub on “hearty Italian” bread, cheddar cheese (there was only cheddar), lettuce, tomato and cranberry sauce with a dusting of salt and pepper.
To complete the meal, a choc-chip cookie and a small soft drink from the self-serve post-mix machine with two little stamps for my Sub Club card. Collect eight, you got a free sub.
If you’ve eaten at Subway lately you might be thinking I’m getting confused with some other sandwich place. Sadly no. 2025 Subway is a joyless abomination of its former glory.
The subs are now almost as expensive as the nuclear ones.
Hearty Italian bread went about 2002, the same year Subway stopped stocking cranberry sauce. I was outraged. My complaints to head office were numerous and ineffective.
A couple of times I brought my own jar to the Subway enclave at my local BP service station. Management didn’t mind but they weren’t so keen on the knife. About 2018 Subway did briefly reintroduce cranberry “relish”. It wasn’t the same. Much drier.
Back in the day the cranberry sauce would be in a big plastic squeeze bottle with the other sauces.
You hoped you were served by a competent sandwich artist who knew to bang the bottle against the garbage slot in the counter first to get the water out. If they didn’t you got a soaking wet sandwich …
