Let's look at the "glass half full" side of the Subway story.
I've never quite understood why Subway shops are allowed to mar the buildings they occupy with oversize signs, garish décor, hideous colors and ghastly lighting. (Don't we have a Belltown neighborhood design review board? Doesn't the city have standards?) Not to mention advertising that convinces the folks who eat there that the mediocre stuff they're ingesting is healthy.
To me, though, the worst offense is olfactory: Subway shops vent their ovens to the street, sending forth a disgusting odor of rancid fat, flour and yeast with all the subtlety of an overflowing outhouse. I suppose it might attract a starving basset hound or a drunken frat boy. "Duh...Mongo smell food. Mongo hungry."
However, and this is the good part, the carbophobic Atkins wackos have forced Subway to adapt. Subway is serving more and more of its "sandwiches" as low-carb wraps, so they're baking fewer loaves. Which means that there's less foul aroma emanating from the Subway grates.
It still grates me, though, that Belltown has somehow spawned four, count 'em four Subway shops [I refuse to call them restaurants]: at 3rd & Lenora, 2nd & Wall, Western & Broad, 1st & Denny. And we're surrounded by an every-growing number of these storefronts ... downtown, at Seattle Center, on Lower Queen Anne.
Why can't one of the franchisees open a decent pho parlor instead?
