Subway Cook Street, Downtown Victoria

Andrea just deleted her link to my blog from her pages.  She can't cope with this review, and can't have her friends see who she's hanging out with occasionally.  If she doesn't, I will at least have to do a run with her which will involve my being mocked for about 35 minutes.  That's okay.  I have plenty of pride still.

But yes, I have eaten a subway sandwich on more than one occasion from Subway.   My preferred meal near my down-town co-work space (hello, The Watershed) is Picnic Too's Breakfast Sandwich (The Better than Timmies, which they still don't call it that on their menu, funnily enough).

However, sometimes, I'm hungry and need something to keep going in the late afternoon after skipping lunch.  Picnic Too is closed. So into Subway for a six inch tuna sub (okay, it's sometimes a foot long).  Whole wheat bread, tuna, toasted with cheese, a layer of lettuce, tomato and cucumber, topped with hot sauce. Wrap up, take back to office.

I like this sandwich.  Subway has this slightly odd smell to it.  It's not a bad smell, it's the smell of the herbed bread wafting around with the fast toasting ovens melting cheese, with the slight whiff irony from 'Eat Fresh' as their slogan when they bring out huge bags of pre-cut lettuce, chilled and transported half way across a continent.

But this sandwich is still good.  The cheese, the hot sauce all mingles together with the tuna-mayonnaise and makes a mess inside the bread.  The bread is odd.  It can barely stay together, like a dysfunctional couple at their mutual friends wedding. It doesn't completely fall apart under the load, but it tears and splits at the seams, obvious to everyone but the couple in question.  You know it really can't hold it together for much longer, but it should just be able to make it long enough so the split is seen out of the public eye, somewhere less embarrassing.

That adds to it's charm, for me.  The morass, tied in with the crisp lettuce and cucumbers (kept crisp by unknown means) has a flavour and consistency that I can't reproduce anywhere else.  I've had great tuna melts (Hawk and Hen, for one) and tuna subs (Salt and Pepper Fox's delivery edition is a truly great thing)... and they are superior beasts for sure. They have nutrition and freshness and locality and care.

But they don't have guilty pleasure and speed and immediacy.  They don't have Franks mingled in with processed cheese.  They don't have the crinkle of the grease proof wrapper in my hands.  If I get a packet of chips with it, there's the salty grease on my fingers and in my stomach that merges in there as well.

It's not high cuisine.  It doesn't make me a better person.  But I like a tuna sandwich from Subway, and I'm not ashamed to admit it in public.