Pat’s Sub Shop

What to expect at Pat’s Sub Shop in Aiken, SC

If you like sub sandwiches of the Delaware Valley made on chewy, muscular bread and containing heaps of raunchy beef or meatballs or stacks of vividly flavored cold cuts and a magnum shot of oil and spice, it will be necessary to set aside your standards of excellence to appreciate the sandwiches made at Pat’s. These are subs of a different nature.

The loaves on which they’re made are fresh, but they are half the weight of one up east. This bread is more fluffy than muscular — no challenge to gnaw, with a dainty character that can beguile taste buds in the same way angel food cake does. Greasy, oozy, heavyweight ingredients would kill these loaves, but nearly all the meats and salads and cheeses Pat’s offers are mild-mannered, too. So, it can be a fine sandwich for anyone wishing to take a walk on the mild side.

Chicken salad, for example, is a house specialty. It is creamy, cool, subtle — a match for the soft loaf that encloses it. The Italian sandwich tests the limits of this style, for while the cold cuts are relatively tame, there are enough of them that if you add oil and vinegar (you must!), the bread will be nothing but soft, moist rags by the time you reach the end of an 8-incher. Likewise, oil oozing from the slices of beef in the Philly steak sandwich demands you eat quickly — especially if you get it “all the way” — before the roll disintegrates.