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I've eaten Subway for decades. Today's offering is a joyless abomination of its former glory
I've been eating Subway sandwiches for a quarter of a century. Mainly out of habit. 2001 Subway was something else: booth seating, ceiling fans with gold trim, leafy green house plants, faux brick and black-and-white New York cityscape wallpaper with a repeating Empire State Building frieze. Ahh. My go-to back then was a foot-long turkey sub on 'hearty Italian' bread, cheddar cheese (there was only cheddar), lettuce, tomato and cranberry sauce with a dusting of salt and pepper. To complete the meal, a choc-chip cookie and a small soft drink from the self-serve post-mix machine with two little stamps for my Sub Club card. Collect eight, you got a free sub. If you've eaten at Subway lately you might be thinking I'm getting confused with some other sandwich place. Sadly no. 2025 Subway is a joyless abomination of its former glory. Let's start with the interior. Today's Subways have embraced the modern bland: grey, white and beige with a feature wall in vomit green. The booths that haven't been heritage-listed are long gone, replaced with coloured seating cubes with no backs – I assume designed to make you leave. But what about the menu? Well, the subs are now almost as expensive as the nuclear ones. Hearty Italian bread went about 2002, the same year Subway stopped stocking cranberry sauce. I was outraged. My complaints to head office were numerous and ineffective. A couple of times I brought my own jar to the Subway enclave at my local BP service station. Management didn't mind but they weren't so keen on the knife. About 2018 Subway did briefly reintroduce cranberry 'relish'. It wasn't the same. Much drier. Back in the day the cranberry sauce would be in a big plastic squeeze bottle with the other sauces. You hoped you were served by a competent sandwich artist who knew to bang the bottle against the garbage slot in the counter first to get the water out. If they didn't you got a soaking wet sandwich. My dad's dad used to run pubs back in the 60s. 'Ice is the cheapest thing you can put in a glass,' he'd say. So I find it bizarre that Subway made the choice about 2020 to replace the post-mix machines with fridges supplying soft drink in plastic bottles. At least Hungry Jack's just moved drink machines behind the counter. But if you want ice at Subway, forget it. Remember the joy of licking a stamp and sticking it to your cardboard Sub Club card? Or better yet, finding a discarded stamp in the street and getting that free sub sooner than expected! Today Subway offers a plastic 'Subcard' with a QR code. The person serving you never asks if you've got one and rarely seems to know when you should scan it. The credit points expire, too. But it's not all bad. Subway introduced toasting ovens in 2005 so you have the choice of a 'toasted' or 'fresh' sub, which does somewhat imply toasted is the opposite of fresh. A tip for employees: if someone orders a classic chicken toasted, you still have to put the fillet in the microwave. Just toasting the bread with the chicken on top leaves the meaty interior the same temperature as the fridge. Modern Subway does offer more cheeses: cheddar, swiss or 'old English' (the orange one). And just this year Anzac biscuits made a welcome return. Subway had abandoned them in 2008 after the Department of Veterans' Affairs noticed it was calling them Anzac 'cookies' and not using the 'official' ingredients. This is why Australia has a Department of Veterans' Affairs. As far as fast-food napkins go, Subway has always had the best. If you reach into any of my jacket pockets you'll always find at least one Subway napkin from a lunchtime past. But Subway has stopped printing its logo on them so now the napkins are just plain white. What other fun features will Subway gradually strip away from its dining experience over the next 25 years? I'll let you know. David M Green is a comedian who reviews video tapes on the web series VHS Revue. He also wrote for Mad as Hell on ABC TV. You can follow him on BlueSky, Instagram and Facebook
