Subway

When you live or travel away from your country of origin for a long period of time, you develop cravings that lead you to do things that you would never think about doing were you still ‘at home’: listening to an Eagles song in a restaurant, watching Everybody Loves Raymond on satellite, or in my case, eating regularly at the local Subway sandwich restaurant. You see, much of the world (especially Japan) still doesn’t do the sandwich thing very well and, as an American, there are few things that can satisfy me at lunch more than a mix of meats and veggies in-between two slaps of non-white bread. For this, there is no place I can go in this city that can do it for a better price than the Besant Nagar Subway.

Kaia’s standby at Subway is the 6” tuna sandwich with extra olives and it can last for both lunch and dinner. He can almost order the thing himself by now and since we go in about once every ten days, the staff there know well that Kaia loves his black olives. As soon as they see him, they prepare a small plate with olives for him to munch while I order. Sometimes, they’ll even take him in the back to watch them prepare his sandwich.

In most respects, the Indian Subway experience is exactly like the American one. While it has been probably 10 years since I ate at one in the US the setup here is much like I remember others to be. The young men carry the euphemism of “Sandwich Artist” and the host of toppings and sauces are ready for your selection. However, with the large number of vegetarians—strict vegans in the Western sense—they have divided the sides into “veg” and “non-veg” so that the sides do not intermingle. Of course, there are also the Indian fusion sandwiches like the Paneer Tikka with mint chutney or Lamb Masala, which are incidentally quite good. If you would have told me that I’d be eating at Subway nearly 20 times over the past year, I’d have argued that there was no way. But in retrospect, it was actually quite decent and served a nice change of pace from time to time.

Why I Love this Time: While I have enjoyed the restaurants here in Chennai, I think more than the food itself—which is good, but upon reflection nothing particularly special (that is, the non-South Indian stuff)—is the service and people who work at these places we frequent. Kaia and I will miss them tremendously.