We Taste-Tested Subway's Worst Sandwich Combinations

When I first asked the sandwich artist at Subway to make me a footlong with a slice of American cheese and a big, thick line of every sauce they had -- no exceptions -- he seemed a little scared, honestly. I could see the fear in his eyes.

But that's what happens when the internet shows off its well of horrible imagination on Reddit, discusses the worst real-ingredient combos you can make at Subway, and inspires me to go out into the real world to try a few user-suggested highlights and Subway's own suggestion. I even threw my own hat in the flavor fusion ring and made my own.

Thrillist All-Stars Carrie Dennis, Ryan Craggs, and Adam Lapetina joined me on this ipecac-esque nightmare. The following are our immediate reactions and musings.

Ingredients: White bread, American cheese, three lines of every damn sauce they have

"I mostly taste Honey mustard... I think. This is like the sandwich you make if you are lazy and all you have in your fridge are old condiments. It's not even really that bad, it's not unbearable, it's just so weird," Craggs said.

And really, he's right. Though it looks like your grandfather's 60-year-old and frequently used handkerchief, the taste is tingly, mushy, and really at the end of the day not even that awful. There's an overwhelming mustard taste to it, which leads me to believe HM is the most potent of all the Subway sauces. And it definitely has a burn to it. Like a lingering case of chlamydia... or so I assume.

"To be frank, I feel like my tastebuds have been zapped out of existence," Lapetina said. 

Ingredients: White bread, piles of salt -- as much salt as the Sandwich Artist is willing to apply, toasted of course.

This is unequivocally the saltiest thing you will ever taste in your life. If you filled a Drake's tears mug up with the entire Atlantic ocean, it would not reach the levels of pure sodium that lay in this sandwich. It was like each of my individual taste buds was strangled and forcibly stripped of any and all moisture. Surprisingly, some of these weirdos liked it. 

"This tastes like a giant, massive saltine... and I don't even hate it," Dennis said. Cole Saladino, our photographer, slipped a bite between shoots and concurred: "I feel like I've made something pretty similar to this before, actually, on purpose."

Ingredients: White bread, meatballs, minced crab (or tuna, if they don't have crab), mayo, marinara, lettuce, tomato -- all microwaved

The tasting of this sandwich was preceded by a chorus of audible gagging, inspired by the the mere sight of this sandwich. "It's just a pile of mush -- like, you can't even tell their lettuce or whatever on it. The taste keeps changing... It's just a pile of goop. It's... It's...It's..." Craggs trailed off, hypnotized by the deranged nature of this sandwich. 

"It's like the worst thing you could possibly eat... and it somehow smells worse than it tastes," Lapetina said. It was like the sandwich was nothing, and everything at the same time. The tasting of the sandwich concluded with a ceremonious chorus of audible dry heaving.

Ingredients: Wheat bread, pickles -- well... you are supposed to get half a jar of pickles, but sometimes that doesn't work out, especially when the Sandwich Artist is really, really, sick of your shit.

"This one tastes like you got a bite of Big Mac that missed everything except the mayo and pickles... which, I guess it is actually?" Dennis rhetorically asked the group.

There's not much to say about this one. If you like pickles and mayo -- like, enough to buoy an entire meal -- you'll probably be OK with this shit. In my own professional opinion, I'd rather eat a jar of fermented possum. 

Ingredients: Meatballs, tuna, a double squirt of sweet onion chicken teriyaki sauce, "not toasted so all the ingredients are lukewarm and the bread gets wet /mushy."

If you would have shaken this, or even held it the wrong way, it would have disintegrated into one big puddle of Persian Orange. It was soaking wet. It doesn't taste like any of its parts. Nor does it taste like the logical sum of its parts. It tastes like an unholy conglomerate of ingredients that inspire only nausea.

"The sweet onion chicken teriyaki sauce makes it taste a little better though..." Lapetina said before taking a second unnecessary bite. "Spicier, definitely," he added.
 

Ingredients: Italian bread, meatballs, eggs, oregano, Buffalo sauce, pepper jack cheese (they used cheddar here because, again, the Sandwich Artist was not having any of our shit)

So, after Subway saw the Reddit thread, they decided to be "fun," and come up with their own riffs on disgusting subs. Too bad their marketing team came up with something decidedly un-gross, in the traditional sense of that made-up word. "Yea, this is weirdly good," Lapetina said. What they birthed was actually one of the better Subway sandwiches I ever remember having, and Saladino agreed with me: "It tastes like a Spaghettio sandwich," he said, "I think I love it."

Leave it to Subway to set out to make a gross sandwich, and inadvertently make a delicious one. Maybe they should try to make all their sandwiches "gross"?

Ingredients: Tuna, buffalo chicken, Feta cheese, Vinaigrette dressing, a crushed up chocolate chip cookie, and the secret ingredient that no one but me knew about: a little bit of ice from the soda machine

Just to be clear, I consider this to my Sistine Chapel... if the Sistine Chapel had hidden ice cubes and chunks of crushed up cookie.

"It's weird, because I taste something different in like every bite. I get chocolate and tuna, then I get buffalo sauce and cheese..." Craggs said. "Yeah, some bites are actually OK, than others are really, really, bad," Lapetina agreed.

"Do any of you guys feel like some bites are really cold? And soggy?" Dennis asked.

The group nodded in collective agreement. 

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