Italian Sub Reviews (No. 1)
My favorite sandwich is The Italian Sub. An Italian sub has several cured meats (e.g., ham, salami, capicola, or mortadella) and provolone cheese. The variation I prefer, and which I often made for myself when employed at Brivi's Deli in Springfield, New Jersey, includes lettuce, tomato, onions, and oil and vinegar. Other people like adding hot peppers, pickles, or maybe mayo (I've heard).
There are probably other standard sandwich toppings that get invoked, but the toppings aren't the main event: how each ingredient is prepared matters the most. For example, the lettuce needs to be shredded, not ripped, or the whole leaf. Delis shred the lettuce by running it through the meat slicer. It only takes a second. The tomatoes should get cut by the slicer too so that they are thin, but not too thin, and uniform in width. The same goes for the onion, and it's almost always a red onion. The meats should be cut very thin. In fact, the right term is "shaved." I found a Kroger Employee Forum online where an employee complained about a customer who asked "chip chop ham" when he meant shaved. Shaved falls apart, thin doesn't. That's the difference.
Finally, the bread needs to be just right. It should be on an Italian roll that has a crust that is soft enough to not scratch the roof of your mouth but is firm enough that you could buy the sandwich at 9:00 am and it still has structural integrity at lunchtime even if there's a full serving of oil and vinegar on the sandwich. The bread should be closer to sweet than sourdough. The oil is vegetable oil and the vinegar is red wine vinegar. Olive oil and balsamic is a different delicious thing but it doesn't belong on this sandwich.
What I have described for you is the perfect Italian sub. They practically grow on trees in New Jersey but for some reason, they are hard to find in the other places I've lived. Delis in Chicago and California feel the need to switch up at least one of these elements, and Alabama didn't even try to sell an Italian. (And don't think it's because it's the South. I had good sushi, Indian, and Jamaican food in Montgomery, Alabama, so I really don't think a sub is too foreign for them.)
Without further throat-clearing, I thought it was time to share with you the attempts at Italian Subs that I have encountered in Northern California, how they compare to The Perfect Sub as described above, and whether I would eat them again. I will give them a score from 1 to 10, and you can assume that the aforementioned sub (made by me in Brivi's Deli in 1991) would garner a 10 in this competition.
I'll start with my most recent sub, The Italian, from Lucia's Craft Sandwich in Martinez. Here's what they got right: the shaved ham was cut properly and there was a lot of it. There was also coppa and salami, and the ratio of meats and cheeses was accurate. Here's what they got wrong: they used arugula. Not even chopped up or anything. It comes standard with hot peppers too, which I think is presumptuous but I'll let that slide since they didn't get mad when I wanted them omitted. The bread was a huge square. I can't even call it a roll because doesn't roll suggest that it has a round dimension? This one didn't. It also came standard with aioli. First of all, they don't have aioli in New Jersey; they have mayonnaise. FOH with the arugula and aioli, California. Second of all, when I asked that they substitute oil and vinegar, the cashier had to double-check that O&V was available. Then, after the sandwich was complete, the woman who made it asked if I wanted a side of aioli because "it'll probably be too dry without the aioli." Not a great sales pitch, to be honest. I pointed out that I had asked for O&V and she said even with the O&V, it might be too dry. Although I thought this was bizarre, I am not going to ding them points for that weird exchange because, by the time I got the sandwich home, the sandwich was pretty perfect from a texture perspective (I'm trying to avoid using the word moist here). The only part of the sandwich which was not right was the arugula, which was sort of squeaky and hard to bite apart. The sandwich is so large, I only ate half.
My score for this sandwich is 7.5. I know I had a lot of negatives, but I suffer from some recency bias. Other Italians I've had in the state have been worse and the meat on the sandwich was (chef's kiss emoji). It's probably from New Jersey.
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