Place: Quiznos
Item: Black & Bleu Salad
Price: $5.49
Surprise -- [insert fast food chain here] has come out with a new line of
salads! Sorry to sound so jaded, but we Lunch Guys are turning cool on the
overheated salad craze. Recently, it's Quiznos that's unveiled the Craveable
Salads: the Black & Bleu, the Roadhouse Ranch, the Yin-Yang Chicken, the
Roman Chicken and the Honey Mustard Chicken.
Following in the high-profile footsteps of McDonald's, KFC, Burger King, Wendy's
and Subway, this lineup faces stiff competition. The Black & Bleu Salad
especially exemplifies what Quiznos is going for to set these salads apart.
But is being different a good thing or a bad thing?
Tom: Salad at fast food joints started as a novelty and in
less than two years has evolved into a joke. Our favorite places now put anything
they want on a bed of lettuce and have a “healthy,” Atkins, South
Beach, Hamptons, low-something meal. We’re one salad generation away
from a burger and fries salad (don’t laugh, I’m thinking about
patenting it).
Then it dawned on me -- this Black & Bleu Salad is simply a two-course
lunch. You remove the steak from your salad, eat the salad first, then have
the steak as your main course. With that in
crumbles and a whisper of onions -- toppings that all
came steaming out of the "toasty" conveyor belt.
Let me drive this point home: When Quiznos says steak, we're not talking the
Steak-umms variety or the jerky at Taco Bell. It has the smooth, rich flavor
of a $15 piece of meat lovingly sliced onto a $5.50 salad. I don't know how
Quiznos does it, and I don't want to. All I know is, when it's lying there
before me in the same portion what would be on a regular-sized sandwich but
without the cumbersome bread in the way, I felt like a real businessman --
steak on my fork, martini in my hand.
Tom: Maybe you were drunk. But let’s be serious, no
real salad lover wants a bunch of unhealthy stuff on a salad, and no real
unhealthy-stuff lover wants to eat just a salad at lunch. The Black &
Bleu is great, but who is if for?
Chris: Ah, therein lies the rub. In trying to please everybody,
it may please nobody. We dug it as a neither-here-nor-there novelty, but it
won’t be on my radar the next time I have a carnivorous (or the more
rare herbivorous) craving.
Rating: 3 sporks (out of 5)
Food facts: 7 g net carbohydrates is the only nutritional
info Quiznos will divulge.
E-mail The Lunch Guys:
tomandchris@thelunchguys.com
mind, Quiznos does everything right on this one. They warm the steak and
bleu cheese (and I must admit, the tender Black Angus strips with warm bleu
cheese is a winning combination). They place a tangy balsamic vinaigrette
on the side, and they throw in some decent cherry tomatoes. My only problem
was that the steak was too good. The thin strips were perfectly sliced, perfectly
cooked, had a perfect homogenous texture and taste with no hint of fat, gristle
or even signs of life. It was what steak would be if it were from a Stepford
cow.
Chris: Good points, Tom. This salad should actually be called
the Perfectly Medium Rare Pink & Bleu Platter. You could go even one step
farther than eating it like a two-course lunch. Make it more manly by replacing
the mixed greens with one sprig of parsley for an all-out steak lunch. Basically,
for me the lettuce was an afterthought anyway. It’s the same bed of
lettuce and three tomatoes in the triangle-shaped tray that all five of the
Quiznos salads share. I was all about that Black Angus meat, accented with
mildly pungent bleu cheese
