I'd somehow managed to make it this long without eating at Jersey Mike's--this despite my widely…read moreknown love of sandwiches.
It used to be there weren't any Jersey Mike's around here. You probably had to go to New Jersey. When they began to appear, it was at a time when I wasn't eating at restaurants as often. (I was not in jail.)
An opportunity presented itself when a location opened in a strip mall near where I live, along with the other four horsemen of the gentrification apocalypse: Raising Cane's, Panera and Five Guys. Plus a Chase Bank branch, which you're gonna have to visit if you plan to eat at any of these places.
I stopped by at noon-ish to have a look, for the sake of citizen food journalism. There was a healthy, but not overwhelming, crowd. A lot more people than at the Five Guys next door. I suspect that people have begun to resent Five Guys because of their prices, even though you end up spending nearly as much, if not more, at Jersey Mike's. It can't be due to the quality of the food. I ate there and it was amazing.
The inside of this Jersey Mike's is not very big. You can eat there if you want to (I did), but you might not want to take a date there. You're gonna be in there nuts-to-butts, and not intentionally so.
It's set up like a Subway, or any number of other fast casual restaurants that were clearly inspired by Subway. You order at one end of the line, explain to a sandwich artist how you'd like your sandwich and then pay at the other end of the line.
Options are a lot more limited--intentionally so, I'm assuming. None of this BS where there's, mathematically speaking, a million different permutations of a ham sandwich. As if. You can get a sandwich on white, wheat or rosemary parmesan. Or some gluten-free option, which, why would you even be at a Jersey Mike's? Sandwiches are served Mike's Way--lettuce, tomato, onion and an oil-and-vinegar blend--by default, to save people who can't read, and people with stuttering problems, from holding up the line. Is that the case even if you order a cheesesteak? Possibly. This is Missouri, after all.
There's only a small handful of things you can get in addition to the standard dress: pickles, banana peppers, jalapenos and some sort of pepper relish. I was curious to know what that pepper relish, or whatever it was, tastes like, but it wasn't that serious. Would the sandwich artist have objected if I'd asked him to give me just a little bit, in my hand, to taste, as if I were at a 31 Flavors? I wasn't about to find out. Peace to Ani DiFranco.
Before I left the house, I asked an AI what the ideal order at a Jersey Mike's was. It said to order a Club Sub, Mike's Way. A Club Sub is something along the lines of a club sandwich, minus the extra bread in the middle, the Ruffles potato chips and the dill spear. It has, as I recall, turkey, ham, bacon and provolone. For whatever reason, seemingly all the sandwiches here come with provolone as the default cheese selection. What, no love for Swiss?
The Club Sub mostly just tastes like turkey. Turkey in general doesn't really taste like anything, but deli meat turkey has a very distinctive flavor. The bacon is precooked and nothing that would pass muster somewhere where it's the primary focus of your breakfast. The wheat bread was nice and robust, with a bit of chew to it, perhaps to withstand the deluge of oil-and-vinegar blend. It soaks into the bread and softens it up a bit, not unlike an Italian beef or a French dip. If you're opting out of the oil-and-vinegar blend (which they disgustingly refer to as "the Juice"), again, I'm not sure why you're eating here.
In addition to the sandwich, which itself ran me upwards of $20, I got chips, a soda and a cookie. It cost me almost exactly the same amount I recently paid for a cheeseburger (i.e. a double cheeseburger), fries and a shake at the Five Guys next door. The jalapeno kettle chips were mediocre. They might need to consider another brand--unless the titular Mike owes someone there money. The cookie was amazing. It doesn't look like much, and it's packaged like it might have rolled off an assembly line in an industrial area over in Maryland Heights, but it's incredibly rich. I probably won't live as long as a result of having eaten it. Given how much I spent, that might be for the best anyway.
