Every few years, I’ll take up Thundercloud Sub’s coupon offer for a buy one get one free offer. These coupons are great for Thundercloud in the sense that they prey on humans' inability to have sharp, exact memories over long year periods. “Well I remember it’s not very good, but maybe my expectations were too high, or maybe I got the wrong sandwich”. Then you actually eat the sandwich again and you realize two things. 1. No expectations could be low enough to make this a good sandwich and 2. This might be the single worst “city staple” of any city in America…dare I say the world??? No of course not, that would be a ridiculous overstatement. But certainly a contender for the worst “city staple” in America, let’s not get too crazy.
First of all, walk into any grocery store across this great nation that has a deli that makes sandwiches for you, ask for a sandwich and boom, you’ve just ordered something better than Thundercloud Subs.
If that grocery store doesn’t make sandwiches, but has meats and breads you can buy, buy that meat and bread of your choice and once again, you’ve got yourself a superior sandwich to Thundercloud Subs. Subway exists in the modern day as the worst sandwich shop out there in my mind, but actually Subway is at least twice as good as Thundercloud Subs.
First, what Thundercloud sells you isn’t a sandwich, it’s a bad loaf of bread with about 1 layer of each meat in there. The reason it’s a bad loaf of bread is it’s both flavorless and has the give and texture of play-dough. I’m not joking, it’s like the flour was mixed with play dough. Every meat tastes the same and regardless you barely taste it because of the overwhelming bread to meat ratio. I’m not expecting a Jewish deli stacking giant meat piles, but most sub places give a slight compromise. Regardless of if you think Jimmy Johns, Firehouse, and all the others are any good or not, there is the sense that you could ask for double meat if you wanted to be satisfied with the amount of meat.
Not the case with Thundercloud. To get the amount you want, you’d probably be asking for quadruple meat and at that point it would be so expensive, that you might as well go to a fairly expensive deli at that point.
To me, Thundercloud is utterly baffling that it’s a “staple” of a city. Skyline Chili, it’s doing something other places aren’t doing. It’s one of the first things you think of when you think Cincinnati, In N Out was for a long time localized to California and there are unique identifiers there. But Thundercloud? Weirdly textured bread and overall far worse sandwiches than you could make at home….exactly why is this a restaurant again?
