Italian Combo Sub from Gabor Brothers Main Street Grill

So, as you may or may not have noticed, both the title of this blog (Supreme Sandwich Task Force) and the mission statement below it on the main page ("Some hungry guys...") imply that there is more than one person involved in this project. And while it's true that I'm the only one writing on this thing (for the time being), I definitely have some fellow travelers on this journey through sandwichdom; namely my dad and brother-in-law. Once a month, we set aside a Saturday afternoon to go grab a sandwich together. Aside from the obvious benefit of companionship, the other great thing about this is that we rotate turns selecting that month's site, and because of that, I've been to a couple new places that I don't think I ever would have discovered on my own. Today's post features one of these new discoveries: Gabor Brothers Main Street Grill in Layton, UT where we traveled based on the recommendation of my bro-in-law.

If I was forced to categorize Gabor Brothers, I would call it an italian restaurant rather than a sandwich shop - as you can see from their menu, they specialize in pizza and pasta dishes, but also serve burgers and sandwiches. Serving sandwiches seems to be a growing trend among pizza joints - even Domino's got in on the game when they added sandwiches to their menu awhile back. Not surprisingly I guess, most of these sandwiches that I've tried seem to taste like...well...pizza. That can be a good or bad thing depending on what you're in the mood for, but it seems to be a fact of life when ordering a sandwich at a pizza restaurant. I suppose at this point I could raise the inevitable "Why would you go to a pizza shop to order a sandwich?!?" question, but I really don't see that as a problem. As long as it's qual, you go ahead and make whatever you want, restaurant owner. Probably not the best business plan, but you go ahead and do it. You want to make tamales at your fried chicken joint? Why not. You want to make burritos alongside your sandwiches? Fine by me. As long as it's good. Sorry, McDonald's, but this clearly means you can't go back to the McPizza. That crap was REESTY.

But I digress. Let's get back to the restaurant at hand. After perusing the menu, I settled on the Italian Combo, figuring it would offer a good representation of what this place's sandwiches were about. The Italian Combo looks something like this:

• Type of Bread: French Roll
• Condiments/Dressing(s): Vinaigrette Dressing
• Toppings: Pepperoni, Salami, Ham, Sausage, Mozzarella Cheese, Bell Peppers, Onions

Now seriously - take a look at those toppings and if you didn't know any better, what do you think I'd be making with those things? See what I mean about sandwiches at pizza joints being just like pizza? I mean the only thing missing is the crust! Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but come on - think outside the box (no pun intended. Get it? cuz pizzas come in a box?? ha ha) a little, right? Anyway, uncanny resemblance to pizza aside, let's take another look at this sandwich and then go to the judges:


Here are the scores for the Italian Combo Sub from Gabor Brothers Main Street Grill:

• Quantity/Value: 5/5 - As you can see from the picture at the top of the post, this sandwich is ENORMOUS. As soon as they dropped that thing in front of me, I knew I'd be taking some of it home (turns out I just barely finished half of it). It set me back $9.95, but that price also included your choice of fries, salad, or soup. Thinking the sandwich might be a bit on the heavy side, I opted for the salad - this was a wise choice. Slamming an order of fries on top of that sandwich would have had my heart hating me big time.
• Originality: 3/5 - Definitely nothing over the top in originality here - a very typical Italian type sandwich - cured meats, mozzarella and vinaigrette dressing. The presentation offered a little bit in terms of originality, but I'll cover that next...
• Appearance: 7/10 - Here's one more close-up shot of the sandwich:




• Again, the thing that you'll notice right away is how much this looks like a pizza. Part of that is appealing - for example, the herbs sprinkled on top give it a nice touch and the bread has been buttered and passed through the oven to give it a nice shiny glow. Part of it however, I think takes away from the appearance. As you can see, they obviously just took their ingredients already prepped for making pizzas and just tossed them on the sandwich. The cheese is shredded and the meat is cut into small pieces. It just kind of looks like someone took the toppings, threw them in all in a blender and then dumped them out on the bread. A little haphazard if you ask me.

• Quality/Freshness: 8/10 - Although I'm guessing the ingredients used on the sandwiches are the same they use on their pizza, that is not to say that they weren't fresh or of good quality. They were. Everything from the bread to the cheese to the meat and veggies looked and tasted fresh. Nice job.
• Taste: 16/20 - The one word I would use to describe how this sandwich tastes is "heavy". All of the meats and cheese and dressing combine to form a very rich sandwich experience. As with a pizza, the peppers provided a nice contrast in both taste and texture to the other ingredients. All together, the sandwich was very savory and satisfying, but it wasn't too long before I had to wave the white flag. Tastes great, but perhaps this is a case of a little too much of a good thing.

All together, The Italian Combo from Gabor Brothers Main Street Grill earns a very respectable score of 39/50. If you've got a serious hunger working and want a delicious pizza turned into a sandwich, this is definitely the place for you.

Classic Italian from Quiznos

So hey, remember in that very last post how I made a big shpeel about how when you're out of town you should go somewhere cool and local instead of going to some chain that you could visit anytime you wanted to at home? Yeah....well, I have a confession to make. After taking a totally amazing cruise to Alaska in May of this year, we had some time to spend in Seattle before driving back home. And where did we go to get a sandwich? Quiznos. Yeah. THAT Quiznos. The same one that's in the strip mall like 2 minutes from my house. I know - I can hear your collective groan from here and I agree - big time LAME on our part. Not that it matters, but here's my (weak) defense - we were on a very tight schedule, we were on foot, and worst of all, I just hadn't done any research ahead of time to know where a really good place to go was. Hungry and in a hurry, we saw the familiar Quiznos sign, knew what to expect and succumbed to the temptation of a quick and easy fix to our hunger dilemma. Now look, I'm not trying to throw Quiznos under the bus here - I like the place. I do. But in a huge, exciting city like Seattle? Come on, there's dozens of really awesome sandwiches that could have been had which simply don't exist back here at home. So, with that confession out of the way I'm asking you right now to help me to ensure that this doesn't happen again. All you have to do is tell me where I need to go to eat a sandwich. Anywhere. Any city - I don't care. Just start filling up the comments section in any one of these posts with things like "Yeah, that looks decent, but you should really go here." or "Dear dumb-crap, you obviously don't know anything because you haven't been here yet." You get the idea.

So back to Quiznos. The history of Quiznos begins in Denver, CO in 1978 with the opening of a sandwich shop called "Sandwich World". A couple years later, Sandwich World was bought out by new owners who changed the name to "Quizno's" and began franchising and pitching the idea of toasted subs, which is the chain's claim to fame. In the 30 years since, Quiznos has gone on to become the second largest submarine sandwich chain in the world behind Subway. There are well over 4,000 locations world-wide.

Despite being in existence since roughly 1980 and starting up in (relatively) nearby Denver, I only became aware of the existence of Quiznos in the late '90's. When I was dating my wife, there was a Quiznos near the building she worked in, so we went there quite often for lunch. In the years since, Quiznos has obviously kept expanding and now they are nearly inescapable.

So anyway, there we were - walking back from The Space Needle on our way to the Mariners/Padres inter-league game and in a rush. We'd already passed the Quiznos once thinking we'd find someplace with better sandwich offerings, but having not found quite such a place, we ducked in and went to work. I went with the Classic Italian, which features the following:

• Type of Bread: I went with Rosemary Parmesan, but Italian White, 9 Grain Artisan Wheat and Italian Herb were also options.
• Condiments/Dressing(s): Red Wine Vinaigrette
• Toppings: Ham, Salami, Pepperoni, Capicola, Mozzarella,Black Olives, Lettuce, Tomatoes, Onions

This sandwich features the types of things you would expect in an italian - cured meats, mozzarella cheese, olives and a vinaigrette dressing. As is customary at Quiznos, I got my sandwich toasted (which involves a quick burn through the conveyor-belted toaster oven, if you've never seen it done before) and we were all set. As is the case when you order any sandwich, your overall experience is at the mercy of whoever is preparing it for you. And today, unfortunately, we got a dud. Sufficeth to say, dude's sandwich making game was weak. And that will show a little bit in the scores:

• Quantity/Value: 4/5 - Quiznos sandwiches are available in three sizes - small, regular and large. As usual, I went with the large which, in this case, set me back $6.99. Under 7 bucks for a solid foot-long sandwich is pretty decent value. However, it's not quite enough sandwich quantity wise (I had no trouble finishing the whole thing in one sitting) or value wise (especially considering the recent rash of $5 foot-long deals) to earn a 5 in this category.
• Originality: 4/5 - Putting cured italian meats and mozzarella on a sandwich has certainly been done before, so this is not getting a 5. However, the combination of meats is a good one and the red wine vinaigrette is a nice touch as well. Also adding to the originality is the toasting factor. It really improved this sandwich and Quiznos, as stated earlier, was the first place to really take the toasting idea and run with it.
• Appearance: 7/10 - Here is where homeboy making my sandwich really started to do his damage on this thing's score. Having made sandwiches for a living myself, it really irks me when someone obviously doesn't take care when doing this. This guy was probably about done with his shift (at least I hope so) and it showed. He slapped that thing together so that the placement of everything was uneven, lop-sided and sad. The only thing not sad is the guy they buy their lettuce from because that guy is making a killing. Hey sandwich-maker - the idea is to put enough lettuce on to cover my sandwich. Not enough that I can take it home and stuff a pillow with it. Thanks. That said, everything on the sandwich looks nice and the toasted bread looks great.
  
• Quality/Freshness: 7/10 - Here is where the chain restaurant/assembly line aspect of Quiznos comes into play and hurts. I have no idea how long any of the stuff that went on my sandwich had been sitting there, but I know for a fact none of it was made to order. That said, the quality was there. The meats didn't look slimy, the lettuce wasn't wilted and the fact that the sandwich was in fact toasted in front of me helps as well.
• Taste: 16/20 - Sandwich guy strikes again as he dumps that dressing on my sandwich as if it were water and he was trying to put out a fire. I'm not really sure what this sandwich is supposed to taste like since it was completely overpowered by the deluge of dressing. Aside from masking the taste of everything else (which was a shame because the other stuff was good - I pulled some of the meats free and tasted them on their own. They had unique flavors - the spicy capicola was especially tasty), the dressing quickly made this sandwich a big time sog-fest which does not help the taste at all. Anyway, the taste probably rated lower than a 16, but I corrected a little bit towards what I believe the sandwich would taste like if it weren't prepared by a distracted, ham-fisted zero.

If we add all those numbers together, we come up with a score of 38/50 for the Quiznos Classic Italian. Oddly enough, that ties the score of the one other major chain sub I've reviewed so far. And, that score is waaay more than the score I would get on choosing a great place in Seattle to get a sandwich at. Epic fail there. Again, not that Quiznos is awful, it's just that I could've and should've found a sweet local joint instead of a place I can go to anytime I want. So yeah, help me avoid making this mistake again by recommending cool sandwich places all over the place and hopefully I can get there.