Dining out: East Coast Subs

East Coast Subs is a simple kind of lunch place: It serves sandwiches and stuff that goes with sandwiches. That kind of thing is great if your product is good but risky if you skimp on quality.

Luckily, the sandwiches at East Coast Subs are good enough to keep the customers coming back.

It's a nice place to have lunch. Built into a corner of the Alphagraphics building, the eatery has both a sunny, three-story atrium in front and, to the west of the building, a shady outdoor eating area. The decor is "east coast" in the Cape Cod sense, with simple lines, earthy colors, and black-and-white pictures of lighthouses and starfish.

Also, for all of you cubicle dwellers, the food is served up in plenty of time to eat, sit back and relax a few minutes before you have to get back to work.

We dropped by for a workday lunch this past week, kids in tow. Although our little boy was happily and loudly exploring the building's particularly echo-prone acoustics, our server just smiled and said how nice it was to have kids in the place.

They have a kids' menu, featuring the twin fried delights of chicken-nugget dinosaurs or corn dogs. Failing that, patrons are free to get the kids a sammie and divide it up.

Divvying will be a must, because these are big sandwiches. The large are fully a foot long, three meals' worth for me and a big lunch even for hearty appetites. They're also generously piled with fillings.

My husband had his favorite, the meatball sub, a simple presentation of ping-pong ball-sized meatballs in a tangy, slightly chunky marinara. The menu says the meatballs are "delicately" seasoned, and they are, with just enough spice to bring out the dark, savory flavor of the meat. The roll, baked on the premises, was crusty outside but not hard on the mouth, and kept the sandwich together well.

I had a cold sandwich, the turkey-bacon Swiss. This is one hearty meal, mounds of thin-sliced turkey, slices of thick-cut bacon, Swiss cheese and, if you get it the way I did, there's also lettuce, tomato, pickles, onions and hot peppers. Every mouthful was a little different, grounded by the nicely roasted flavor of the meat. I love the way East Coast Subs does hot peppers, chopping them up so their juice gets all through the sandwich and there's lots of peppery flavor without the overwhelming heat that results from eating a whole pepper in one bite of sandwich.