7300 Middlebelt RoadI’m going to be spending a little time on the road over the next few weeks. It started this past weekend and will kind of be off and on until the middle of June. Some of it is for work. Some of it is for skating.
I started my travels last Thursday with a day trip to Detroit. A co-worker and myself needed to run over there to take care of something ahead of a bigger job we have there comin up later this week.
We spent about two hours in downtown Detroit then headed back to Kalamazoo. As we were leaving the parking garage, I told her I was going to stop at a sandwich shop by the airport to grab something. I told her we could stop somewhere else if she wanted something different but she seemed to be on board with what I was doing.
That sandwich shop is Vinnie’s Italian Sub Shop. It’s located on Middlebelt Road just north of the I-94 interchange. The long time deli is a stand alone building right on the corner of Charles Street and Middlebelt. The surrounding area is mostly residential but the small cement block building doesn’t seem to out of place along the very heavily traveled road.
Vinnie’s has been at this location near the airport since 2001 and a Free Press article in 2013 described it as “a sub joint – not an old time Italian market.”
The space is pretty small as I assume most people do carry-out. The menu is pretty small as well. Hanging above the order counter and deli case with the meats and cheeses used to make the subs is hand painted signs with the selections. There are a few warm sandwiches but the popular option is the Italian subs made with a combination of Italian meats and cheeses. You order by the layers. It starts at 5/1 which is five layers of meat and one layer of cheese and goes up to 21/5 (twenty-one layers of meat and five layers of cheese). If you don’t want the Italian meats, there are also options for turkey, ham, tuna, and a veggie sub.
I didn’t go for the biggest sub but I did go big. I got the 18/4 while my colleague did the Turkey & Swiss sub. The sandwiches come with lettuce and a house made Italian dressing on a fresh baked sub bun. You can go “loaded” for an extra $.60 and add tomato, onion, and banana pepper rings. I just added the banana peppers. The cost for the two sandwiches just under $23.
The shop isn’t very big but there is a small dine in area with a counter along the wall and some stools to sit on. There’s a cork board right above the tile counter plastered with business cards from the area. Co-worker and I were tired and ready to get on the road so once we got our wrapped sandwiches handed to us, we headed back to the car and headed back towards Kalamazoo.
Co-worker unwrapped hers in the car and ate as we were driving. I’m always nervous bringing colleagues to places like this because a lot of people in our business stick to fast food or fast casual chains. I love places like Vinnie’s but that’s just me. She took a bite of her sandwich and gave me this look like “OMG.” She said it was a simple sandwich but the Italian dressing and soft yet somehow still crusty sub bun made this simple sandwich delicious.
I waited until I got back to the office in Kalamazoo to eat knowing I wouldn’t be able to handle the mammoth sandwich I ordered while driving. The 18/4 is a lot of food. The sandwich is tightly packed layers of salami, capicola, ham, pepperoni, and provolone. There’s a thick layer of lettuce on top of that which soaks up the deliciously tangy Italian dressing. I only added on the banana pepper rings and they had another layer of vinegary tanginess to the sandwich. I severely underestimated how big 22 layers would be and had a hard time getting this whole thing in my mouth. the 12/3 or even the 10/2 would have been more than enough but I happily gobbled up every last bite of this amazingly tasty sandwich.
Vinnie’s Italian Sub Shop is a great place not too far off the highway and not too far from Detroit Metro Airport. The lady working the counter was giving my co-worker kind of hard time because she kept asking for mods that they don’t do (toasting the sandwich was one that got a chuckle….”toasting a sub is how places hide bad bread…our bread is made fresh every morning”). In the end, we both really enjoyed our sandwiches and this was such an easy, cheap stop on our way back to Kalamazoo from Detroit.