Quiznos Classic Italian

The Quiznos Classic Italian is built around a machine. Genoa salami, pepperoni, ham, and capicola go onto a sub roll with mozzarella and a red wine vinaigrette, and then the assembled sandwich rides a moving belt through a countertop conveyor oven, the TurboChef-style unit that Quiznos put behind the counter of every store and made the centerpiece of the brand. The vinaigrette goes on before that pass, not after, so its acid sinks into the meats while they warm rather than sliding off a hot sealed surface. The mozzarella is chosen for how it flows rather than how it tastes. By the time the belt delivers the sandwich, the salami's edge has softened, the pepperoni fat has loosened and slicked the crumb, and the cheese has gone molten through the layers.

The company sold the chain on that conveyor. Quiznos did not invent the Italian sub or the cured-pork-and-mozzarella combination, both of which long predate it, and it did not claim to. What it claimed was the oven. Where the dominant sandwich chain of the era served its subs cold by default, Quiznos toasted everything, and the warm, slightly greasy, melted result was a deliberately different product sold as the better one. Lambatos, the founder, put it plainly: heating brings out the flavors in food. The Classic Italian is the clearest demonstration of that thesis on the menu, because four cured meats and a mozzarella respond more dramatically to heat than a turkey-and-Swiss does.

Ordering one is choosing the house build rather than composing your own. The four-meat-and-mozzarella combination is fixed; the customer's decisions are the heat level on the pass and a trip to the pepper bar, the self-serve rack of banana and jalapeno peppers that Quiznos kept by the registers. That pepper bar is so tied to the brand that it turned up in the company's advertising, and the advertising is where the chain became briefly, genuinely famous. In 2004 Quiznos licensed two crudely animated singing rodents called the Spongmonkeys, created by the British animator Joel Veitch from his viral clip "We Like the Moon," and rewrote their song as "We Love the Subs," with the line "they are tasty, they are crunchy, they are warm because they toast them. They got a pepper bar." By most accounts the company fielded tens of thousands of complaint calls in the campaign's first week. People remembered it anyway.

The build still has to survive the heat, and the roll is what carries the load. A thin roll scorches and shatters on the belt; a dense over-crusted one armors the sandwich so the inside never warms. The Classic Italian needs a crumb strong enough to take a hot, oil-slicked load and a blast of dry heat and stay liftable. The meats are sliced thin and shingled rather than stacked in bands, so they warm through on the short conveyor pass instead of tightening into leather, and so every bite carries all four cured notes at once rather than all pepperoni at one end and all ham at the other. What arrives is soft, warm, and a little oily in the hand, the cured sharpness rounded by the oven and the vinaigrette running through the middle as a warm tang, with none of the crisp cold snap of an unheated sub.

The cold Italian hoagie is the sandwich this one is arguing against. Same meats, same cheese, left unheated, so the cured sharpness stays bright and the dressing stays a finishing splash instead of cooking into the crumb. The two are settled, opposite answers to one parts list, and the cold hoagie has its own page. The leaner and hotter Quiznos variations are smaller turns: a version that drops the pepperoni, one that loads the toast with extra peppers, a different house dressing. None of them moves the sandwich off the belt, which is the one thing that is not negotiable.

Origin and history

Quiznos was founded in 1981 by Jimmy Lambatos, an experienced chef, with the partner Todd Disner, at the corner of 13th and Grant Streets in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Denver, Colorado. Lambatos had eaten subs on crusty Italian bread in New York and found that out west they were built on soft hot-dog rolls, so he set out to make a better one and decided to toast it. The toasted sub became the defining feature of the chain. Franchising began in 1983, and in January 1991 the father-and-son team Richard and Rick Schaden bought the roughly eighteen-store chain from the founders and drove its national expansion.

The growth peaked in 2007, when Quiznos operated around 4,700 locations in the United States and the toasted sub was a recognized fast-food category. Then it collapsed. Franchisees revolted over a model that required them to buy food and supplies through the company at marked-up prices, lawsuits piled up, and stores closed by the hundreds. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 14, 2014, in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Colorado.

By the mid-2010s the count had fallen from that 2007 high to a few hundred United States stores, and it kept sliding from there. The conveyor oven that defined the brand outlasted most of the storefronts that ran it, and the Classic Italian, the sandwich that showed best what the oven could do, outlasted the franchise that built around it.