Our Favorite Jersey Mike's Sub Is Better Than The Turkey And Provolone

Jersey Mike's Subs, with 3,000 franchises and growing, knows how to make sub sandwiches that people want to eat, including one that we think outshines the rest. The Club Sub was the winner in a Food Republic taste test of eight Jersey Mike's sandwiches, claiming the top spot with its combination of turkey, ham, provolone cheese, applewood smoked bacon, and mayo. It's a leveling up of the Turkey and Provolone, one of the chain's most popular subs.

Jersey Mike's bakes its bread fresh each day at the store itself and uses premium meats and cheeses that are sliced fresh when you order. The Club Sub contains three of these top-quality cold cuts, providing a balance of flavors with the mild sweetness of ham playing off the savory turkey and buttery cheese. Bacon cooked daily on the grill top is a key part of the winning sandwich, adding salty smokiness and a crisp textural element, and the tester also noted its freshness and temperature. A white bread sub roll, cut then and there, cradles the ingredients, contributing its soft consistency to every bite. Rich and creamy mayo blends with the sandwich's components and pulls them all together to create the best experience out of all the subs. 

Getting the sub "Mike's Way," brings veggie brightness from shredded lettuce, sharp onions, and juicy sliced tomatoes — all sliced right in front of you — and enhances flavor with an olive oil blend, tangy red wine vinegar (which actually does have a tiny bit of alcohol), dried oregano, and salt. All of the Club Sub elements combine to create the perfect balance of flavor, texture, and even temperature. 

While the Club Sub was our champion sandwich, the Tuna Fish sub was the unfortunate last-place finisher. Like many of Jersey Mike's offerings, the tuna salad for this sub that comes on a white bread roll, a blend of canned albacore and light tunas, chopped celery, mayonnaise, and black pepper, so a lack of freshness isn't the problem. Instead, our tester found that the sandwich was just too overwhelmingly fishy. Even ordered Mike Way's with the added lettuce, onions, tomato, and seasonings, the taste of the tuna overpowered the other parts of the sub — and largely because of the type of tuna used. Unfortunately, it's not the quality that many of the other ingredients at Mike's are. 

A good tuna salad incorporates ingredients that provide the right balance of tastes and textures, like crunchy celery (which you can rescue if it's gone limp), sharp onion, relish, perhaps some pepper, herbaceous dill, and creamy mayonnaise or another tuna salad mayo substitute. They complement and add flavor to the tuna, but also work to tame its fishiness. Jersey Mike's Tuna Fish sub falls short of the mark by letting the tuna flavor be too prominent, and not having any other ingredient really shine through. To jazz it up, you may want to do something like add extra onions for crunch and punch, or maybe some banana peppers for the salt and kiss of heat they bring.