Jersey Shore Italian Sub

The Jersey Shore Italian sub is sized for the beach before it is anything else. A shore counter builds it on a long Italian roll that can run two feet, sells it by the half-foot and the whole, and wraps it tight so it survives a walk down the boardwalk and an afternoon on the sand. Capicola, prosciutto, and Genoa salami shingle the length of it with provolone, then a dress of oil, red wine vinegar, oregano, lettuce, tomato, and hot peppers goes on, and the thing is cut on the bias into shareable lengths. The scale is the identity here. This is a sub built to feed a beach blanket, not one person at a counter, and the wrap and the length are engineered around carrying it somewhere and splitting it.

Down here it is a sub, flatly, and the word matters. Philadelphia an hour west says hoagie and means roughly the same architecture, but the shore took the Navy's term and kept it, lettering it onto storefronts and menus from Atlantic City down to Cape May. A shore counter that sells a hoagie is usually one with Philadelphia in its blood; a shore counter that sells a sub is the native dialect. The seam runs somewhere across the Pine Barrens, and on the ocean side of it the long Italian roll is a submarine.

The dress is where the shore declares itself against the creamier builds inland. Oil and red wine vinegar, not mayonnaise, with oregano shaken over the top and hot peppers worked in, long hots or a cherry-pepper relish that carries the sharp note a sandwich eaten warm in the sun needs to stay bright. A shore regular asks for it loud on the vinegar, because the acid has to keep cutting through an hour after assembly, and a sub built mild reads flat on the sand. "The works" or "everything" pulls the full dress without a recital, and the size, a half or a whole or a three-footer for a group, is the rest of the order.

What pins this sub to a place is the shop genealogy, and it runs back to one counter. White House Sub Shop opened in 1946 at the corner of Mississippi and Arctic avenues in Atlantic City, and the Sacco family that helped found it has been turning out subs the same way since. In 1969 a Sacco opened Sack O' Subs in Ventnor, down the beach from the original, and the family carried the build to Ocean City in 1994; the downbeach towns eat a sub whose lineage traces to a single Atlantic City storefront. The shore sub has no inventor, but along this stretch of coast it has a bloodline, and most of the famous counters can name the one they branched from.

The cold Italian sub wears a different name in almost every region that makes it, and the shore version is one dialect of a sandwich spoken across a quarter of the country. New York says hero, southern New England says grinder, and a hundred delis just say "Italian," all of them naming the same shingled architecture under local words and local dressing rules. The shore's own contribution is the size, the oil-and-vinegar insistence, and the boardwalk the sub is carried onto. A submarine ordered hot, with the meats griddled or the provolone melted, is a separate sandwich that happens to start on the same roll.

Famous for Subs Since 1946

White House Sub Shop opened in 1946, founded by Anthony "Tony" Basile with his aunt Basilia and uncle Alfred "Fritz" Sacco, in a building whose front had been Basile's tailor shop. By most accounts his wife had been selling sandwiches from the kitchen during the war, and after it Basile closed the tailoring side and opened the front as a cold submarine counter. Its subs ran roughly two feet long, and the shop turned its spot near the casinos and the boardwalk into a half-century of celebrity custom whose photographs cover the walls.

The format's name is older than the war usually credited with it. The "submarine" label is often traced to the United States Navy submarine base at New London, Connecticut, but a printed Wilmington, Delaware, advertisement from 1940 uses the term before the country entered the Second World War. A rival New Jersey claim credits Dominic Conti, said to have named a "submarine roll" after seeing the recovered 1901 submarine Fenian Ram in the Paterson Museum around 1928. None of the naming stories is settled, and the sandwich plainly predates all of them.

The most repeated single proof of the shore sub is a 1964 order. After the Beatles played Atlantic City that summer, the band could not get to the shop through the crowds, so a White House sub was carried to them instead, a six-footer that the four ate in their hotel. The shop has lettered "Famous for Subs since 1946" on its storefront ever since, and shore lore even holds that Lennon and McCartney wrote a song in their room that same night, a claim worth less than the sandwich but repeated almost as often.