Leeds St, Footscray, Victoria
Bookings Inessential, impossible in fact
Seating Up to two per table
Toilets Nil
Price Around $7 per head (more for footlong)
Features Delightful pour-your-own post-mix machine
(Jake Longstreth)
I despise fast food that postures as healthy, balk at strangely tasteless bread and consider Jared my epicurean nemesis, so what the devil am I doing sitting in Subway? Convenience. It is the scourge of modern eating, yet alas, we’re all guilty of it at one point or another. I’m all too happy to disclose that I don’t mind slumming it with the great unwashed at Hungry Jacks when the desire strikes, but Subway has always struck me as floundering in the shallow end of that great takeaway food pool.
Apparently the staff at this particular franchise, flanking the Footscray railway station, couldn’t agree more, such is their desire to impress upon me their singular lack of dedication to and conviction in their place of employment. The gentleman I find opposite me as a stride up to school canteen-style serving area is at pains to make sure my brief interaction with him is as bland, hasty and sloppy as the food he prepares me.
This impatient ‘sandwich expert’ – or whatever it was Doctor’s Associates, in a recent propaganda drive, called their army of underpaid student and immigrant labourers – moves so fast from one sandwich element to the next that I find myself making foolish snap decisions. Did I actually desire red onion and mayonnaise on my meatball sub? And did I really want two cookies?
No time for reflection, and before I know it I’m unwrapping the sad approximation of a sandwich that was prepared for me only seconds before. ‘Prepared’ is, perhaps, a little generous – slapped together is more accurate: meatballs crushed to one side of the unevenly cut bread, salads and that cursed mayonnaise falling out the other. The wrapping is an afterthought, as if done by the hands of a kindergartener.
Though I’ve chosen it (choice, of course, being the inalienable right of fast food consumers), the combination of textures is woeful – the rubbery meatballs, their excessively rich sauce clashing with the bland, sloppy mayonnaise, those chunks of tomato that posses an alarming crunchiness, those despicable stringy slices of red onion.
The play of flavours, meanwhile, is imperceptible. Indeed, it is the defining characteristic of all Subway dishes that everything tastes the same, within and between sandwiches. 'Why so', you ask? Be it the claustrophobic space in which all the ingredients are prepared? Or, perhaps, Doctor’s Associates devised some form of primeval soup of foodstuffs in their Mephistophelian laboratory, so that with the tweak of a few settings the appearance of meatball, olives, bread, cheddar, ham, crab, and so forth issues from the same strange grey goop.
Whatever sandwich you do choose, that is, you are guaranteed but one flavour: regret. And this taste haunts you in those demonic little burps, yeasty and saucy, that uncontrollably manifest from deep within your gut, as if your body had a mind of its own and was toiling desperately to exorcise the foul substance you have just ingested.
In all, possibly the finest aspect of dining at Subway is this revelation, once again, of how truly disgusting it is, ensuring that you will think twice again before going there for a good year or so. If you do, however, heed this: if fast food is plastic, Subway is the detritus of wrappers, bottles and bags that cling to school-yard mesh fences compared to, say, the Tupperware that is Grill’d.
0.5 gulls
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