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| - This Jimmy John's replaced the Worst Chipotle in the Universe, so now, for roughly the price that used to get you lukewarm and poorly prepared Mexican food delivered with a sullen attitude, you can receive a pleasant sandwich served swiftly, with a smile and a cookie.
JJ's is roughly what would happen if Warren Buffet read Douglas Adams' Mostly Harmless -- the one with the sandwiches and the Perfectly Normal Beasts -- and decided that herein lay the future of putting meat between two pieces of bread. The chain decor cannot quite decide if it's preparing guests for their MBAs with plaques of how-to-succeed advice or if it's trying to be funky and in-joke-y and hipster. Your concentration is better devoted to your sandwich.
An 8" sandwich runs in the neighborhood of $5, or a bit under $9 with a drink and your choice of chips, pickle, or large cookie. So it's not quite as cheap as Subway, but it's a lot better. Take the bread. JJ's bread is not a spongy substance that can be mistaken for a yoga mat. It's more like a fresh bolillo or perhaps an elongated kaiser roll. It tastes like actual bakery bread. The meat, similarly, tastes like deli meat, not like meat you'd pick up from the refrigerator section of the dollar store. The portions are not huge, but they're in line with what you'd get at very similar Potbelly or from an $8.50 deli sandwich (no drink, no chips, no pickle, no cookie) from AJ's. Since the meat's just as good as the AJ's sandwich and the bread's better, I'd go with JJ's over AJ's.
The cookie also is comparable to AJ's cookies from the bins, but larger. It's not the greatest cookie you'll ever eat in your life, but it's better than many of the cookies at the Paradise Bakery next door.
Service is so fast that my sandwich, completed and wrapped, hit the counter while I was still deciding on my cookie.
So essentially, a JJ's sandwich will not be a life-changing New York deli experience, but the place is staffed by hoopy froods who know where their towels are, and you can count on its being mostly harmless.
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