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Our foodie Meg takes on Subway Japan’s ridiculously big, surprisingly cheap Giant Sub sandwich

Casey Baseel Feb 3, 2018
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Beautifully braided, humorously huge, and astoundingly affordable.

Compared to other fast-food options, Subway’s sandwiches have a reputation as a sensible, diet-friendly healthy option. It turns out, though, that there’s a secret way to have Subway make something absolutely crazy and packed with more calories than a week’s worth of lunches.

It’s called the Giant Sub, and as our reporter Meg recently found out, it’s a massive mass of bread, vegetables, meat, and/or seafood. It’s not listed anywhere on Subway’s printed menu, but the chain will be happy to make one for you, just as long as you ask for it by name and give them a bit of advance notice.

▼ Because when you’re ordering something this huge, you don’t want to hold up the line by asking the staff to make it for you on the spot.

Meg called up her local Subway branch to request a Giant Sub, and was told she could pick it up in two days. When she did, the staff handed her a gigantic cardboard carrying case with the sandwich cradled inside.

Subway offers the Giant Sub in four varieties: roast beef, BLT, shrimp and avocado, and teriyaki chicken. You can choose to have the same filling for the entire thing, or any combination of the four. We opted for the maximum variety, and so when Meg slid the sandwich out of its container, she found stickers on the wrapper denoting the contents of each quadrant, like a labeled topographical map of a world we were about to devour.

But the real impact came when we took the wrapper off.

The Giant Sub’s bread portion consists of a network of braided buns, and looks so pillow soft that Meg had to resist the temptation to lay her head down on it and take a nap.

In terms of total size, the Giant Sub is as large as eight regular-sized Subway sandwiches.

▼ So really, we had nine sandwiches’ worth of food on the table here.

While Meg would have liked to bite into the mega-sandwich right then and there, it was too big for her to wrap her hands around, so we had to slice it first.

While this is, on paper, just a big Subway sandwich, eating the Giant Sub is a unique experience. For one thing, the braided construction of the bread makes it extra-fluffy and satisfying to bite into. And if you opt for a variety of filling options like we did, depending on how you slice up the gigantic sandwich, you can get new flavor combinations in your portion. Our personal favorite was mixing teriyaki chicken and roast beef.

Before Meg left to pick up the Giant Sub, we’d handed her a 10,000-yen (US$89) bill, figuring that the tab would be the same as our 10,000-yen pickle burger, 10,000-yen pork cutlet curry, or 10,000-yen Yoshinoya beef bowl. And yet, when the clerk rang our order up at the register, Meg discovered she could have bought two of these mammoth meals, and even had change left over, because the price of our Giant Sub was just 3,980 yen (US$36).

Remember when we said the Giant Sub is as big as eight regular-sized sandwiches? It also costs exactly the same as eight normal sandwiches, since our bill was calculated as:
● Giant Sub: 0 yen
● 2 roast beef sandwiches: 1,160 yen
● 2 shrimp avocado sandwiches: 980 yen
● 2 BLT sandwiches: 820 yen
● 2 teriyaki chicken sandwiches: 980 yen

That’s right, there’s absolutely no surcharge for the extra labor and packaging involved in making/transporting the Giant Sub. As a matter of fact, you could get one for as little as 2,400 yen (US$21) if you opted for one that’s all BLT, and even if you specced yours as a top-of-the-line entirely roast beef Giant Sub, it’d still only come to 4,650 yen.

So if you’re feeling extra-hungry, or want to bring something that’s sure to have plenty of impact at a party without hitting you too hard in the wallet, Subway Japan’s Giant Sub is a great choice. And if you really do have your heart set on running up an approximately 10,000-yen bill at the sandwich shop, you can always pick up a normal sub with 82 scoops of egg salad filling too.