One million options, but forever the same taste. Here's how to make your Subway experience more palatable. By Jesse Mulligan.
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In the seventies there was a television ad campaign for Clayton’s, a new non-alcoholic drink for sale in New Zealand and Australia. It showed a man ignoring the peer-pressure of his boozed up mates and ordering a Clayton’s from the barman, as a booming voiceover said, “Claytons – it’s the drink you have when you’re not having a drink.”
Not all advertising catchphrases take flight but this one did. More than 30 years after the advertisements were last broadcast, “Clayton’s” is still a shortcut-word among a particular generation for anything that isn’t what it seems: the dictator announced a Clayton’s election; the office is having a Clayton’s Christmas party; and, most popular of all, is the Clayton’s Choice – the choice you have when you don’t have a choice.
Everyone who eats there knows Subway’s dirty secret: that no matter what you order and how it’s prepared, your sandwich will taste exactly the same.
Usually this refers to a tight situation – somebody holds a gun to your head and suggests you withdraw your life savings, for instance – but I thought of it again last week when I was at Subway, and the girl making my sandwich (Sandwich Artists, they’re called, though nobody except me seems to know that, so maybe they don’t lean on it very heavily in their marketing) asked me which salads and sauces I wanted.
There must literally be a million different ways to put together a foot long sandwich; six types of bread times ten types of meat times a dozen vegetables – before you even get to dressings. And you’re forced to go through with the pageant of carefully stating your particular, personality-defining preferences each time you visit. But the truth is that everyone who works at this place and everyone who eats there knows Subway’s dirty secret: that no matter what you order and how it’s prepared, your sandwich will taste exactly the same.
Yes, just as a cat shares 90 percent of a human’s DNA, so a tuna mayo sub will taste 90 percent like one with beef and chipotle. Not that it tastes horrible, mind you – cheesy, tangy, crunchy, yeasty; there’s enough fat, salt and sugar, in approximately the right proportions, to maintain Subway as my go-to lunch joint when I forget to bring food from home. To be clear: I can eat it, I’m just morally opposed to the premise.
You can’t make your sandwich taste particularly different, but you can make it taste like the best possible version of same. I have a couple of key deviations from the main menu choices which, though making me look like a sociopath, I think make an appreciable difference to the end result.
Jalapenos are key. Spicy and acidic, they can affect the flavour of your sandwich more than any other ingredient on offer, so I request “extra” and then, when the Sandwich Artist invariably fails to put enough of them on, I quietly tell her to add “More. More. More. More”, like Patrick Bateman instructing the graphic designer to increase the font size on his business cards.
The only ingredient which can truly transform any other ingredient is salt, so I break up the script and call for it early.
The only ingredient which can truly transform any other ingredient is salt, so I break up the script and call for it early – straight after the tomatoes, actually, these red quasi-fruits being invisible and not a little mooshy without the discerning addition of sodium after (or ideally some time before) they go on your sandwich.
Early Salt is so radical at my local Subway that it took them a long time to even compute what I was asking for. I might as well have asked the girl to sing the sandwich a song, but to her credit she’s a fast learner, and she wouldn’t be a true artist if she didn’t immediately throw away all her core beliefs and training as soon as the person paying the bills asked her to.
Subway offers a Clayton’s Choice not in the traditional sense of offering no choice at all, but in a much more depressing sense of offering you the world but only actually delivering the one thing. It’s the sandwich you design when you’re not actually designing a sandwich, and I would take my business elsewhere, if there were any other half-decent choices.