From their perch in Sharkatraz atop the tallest apartment building in Astoria, Max Robinson and Mike Pfeiffer are The Trash Boys. In The Trashford Files, they investigate and review foods that are normally best eaten alone drunk in the dark after a breakup.
This sandwich is a fiction created by your Admiral Marcus
The Gastronomic Artifact
What are we putting in our talk holes?
Mike: I need you to think about the last time you had a hankerin’ for Fritos®. We’ve all had those moments where nothing will satisfy but a bunch of corn meal and salt pressed and fried into the shape of an over-long toenail, right? It’s not like Fritos® are a thing that you only ever get by accident and try and pass off to your friends, right?
Max: Thankfully, Official Sponsor of Mens Rights Activists Subway has found a way to combine the frown-inducing taste of Fritos® brand witch nails and their signature brand of lukewarm sad subs. The result is Fritos® Chicken Enchilada Melt.
Mike: Knowing that it’s awesome to put side-foods on top of main courses is a rite of passage that shows you both understand the importance of textures in food and don’t have time to eat two things separately. Potato Chips on your tuna sandwich, Bloomin’ Onion on your Lobster Tail, and now Subway stops making us arduously add chips to our own sandwiches with this Frito®-topped masterpiece that Max and I first saw advertised during the Super Bowl.
Max: Have you ever been close to tragedy? Or been close to folks who have? Have you ever felt the pain so powerful, so heavy you collapse? This is that. This sandwich is the weight of the nineties crushing your chest like so many heavy stones. Confess, Giles Corey. Confess to Monsignor Frito® and feel absolution.
augh
Presentation
How it look?
Max: Look at this bastard. There’s something off, right? It’s like looking at one of those mutant albino hornet nests, there is something WRONG here. We are watching a crime. You dare call this thing…..”sandwich”?
Mike: Who hasn’t had a delicious sandwich with the filling unceremoniously dumped out of a little paper shame tub onto a Vietnam War-era sheet pita re-termed “Flatbread” for civilian consumption?
Max: A trip to Subway always means you get to watch a bored, underpaid sandwich artist put a really wimpy looking fast food sandwich into the monster maker oven, but this visit meant “a man violently shakes ‘enchilada’ onto bread with the enthusiasm of disposing of a used condom.”
Mike: The cool thing about Subway is that they have pictures of the sandwich and get to watch yours get made, and step by step you see it not be anywhere near as good as the picture. You’re watching a child fall behind in math, drop out of middle school and start selling drugs and then it gets put on bread and you eat it.
Taste
Does it satisfy?
Mike: One in six bites of this sandwich was straight up the taste of a mouthful of cigarette ashes. For those of you keeping score, that’s 2 solid inches of American tobacco out of 12 inches of sandwich.
Max: As Mike pointed out during consumption, this tastes almost exactly like Taco Bell. Specifically, Taco Bell that’s been sitting in a refrigerator and then half-heartedly microwaved for 8 seconds. I want to clarify that we were not given the sandwich with the ingredients specified here, by the way. Our sandwiches had Swiss cheese and Sriracha sauce(?) on them, making everything even more inexplicable. You can try and argue that this means we didn’t eat the “real” Fritos® Chicken Enchilada Melt. but I will counter-argue that we’ve suffered enough also fuck you get out of here.
Mike: You don’t think a fistful of black olives would have saved this sandwich? Weird. But f’real how can a bunch of things that are fun and delicious suck so badly when you put them together and toast them? This is like eating a One Direction song. A bunch of guys in a room said “People like salt and chicken and the word ‘Sriracha,’ jam those in one thing and watch it fly off the shelves.” Would a real Sandwich Artist participate in such a cynical cashgrab? Where is the Banksy of sandwich artists to make a five dollar footlong that makes us reconsider capitalism?
Max: To be fair, this sandwich did make a very clear statement and that statement was “You People Will Literally Eat Anything”.
Hh.
Practicality
How easy is it to put in your talk hole?
Max: Mike and I didn’t finish these.
Mike: It’s not easy. It’s a slog. It’s about as easy as going on a new-age barbed wire cleanse to really scour toxins from your chakras, except that you’re also sitting under the hellish fluorescents of one of the five Subways located a block from your house.
Max: I would say this is easy to eat in the same way eating a scoopful of lye or a drain-o milkshake is also easy to eat.
Mike: Tyler Durden makes you cram a Fritos® Enchilada sandwich in your mouth and the only way to wash it down reliably is Mountain Dew Code Red. Trust him.
Shame Factor
Would I eat this in front of a date or in a job interview?
Mike: Max and I eat pizza off of trash cans. We gave ourselves sodium poisoning with fries. At our holiday party I dipped a bunch of bagel bites in guacamole and then crumbled buffalo pretzels over it. It takes a DARPA experiment to find our fucking shame and we still had to wrestle each other into our local Subway.
Max: The Subway Fritos® Chicken Enchilada Melt is the sandwich equivalent of a flaccid dick. You can put that on my damn gravestone.
Mike: On the way back to Sharkatraz after a sandwich literally tested our friendship, we figured out that the reason Subway is horseshit is because it’s a restaurant where nothing gets cooked. You’re paying to tell someone to touch things instead of you and make a sandwich worse than you’d make a sandwich.
Max: You’re paying someone to fuck your spouse with a Freddy Kruger mask on when you go to Subway. Eat Fresh.
The Frito® Bandito Test
Can a Sandwich be racist?
Max: This was a hateful sandwich. Subway’s idea of Mexican cuisine is putting some kinda psuedo shredded chicken on faux-tortilla with cheese and PepsiCo product chips. I did not know a sandwich could be racist but Subway took me by the hand and flew me around in the Metropolis moonlight. You Will Believe A Sandwich Can Be Racist.
Mike: The sandwich is racist because it’s a bunch of things that aren’t Mexican being labeled as a Mexican thing, features the world’s only brand of racist chips, and also because it’s completely inedible unless you’re an actual racist who believes that you can get Mexican food from a Subway.
Max: This is the sandwich you’d get if you asked a blisteringly drunk Guy Fieri to make a Chopped! meal out of K-rations.
Mike: This is the high water mark in racist fast food until Jamba Juice finishes it’s Black History Month Jim Crowtein Health Shake.
Final Rating
Is it worth feeding your self loathing to purchase?
Max: Guys… don’t eat this thing. I know we like to have fun here at The Trashford Files but there was nothing enjoyable about this experience. If the 10-minute process of eating this sandwich could be transcribed into an abstract image, it’d be Subway Jared in a mesh tank top leaning over a spray-painted black Yugo vomiting his guts out and crying.
Mike: If I saw a rat eating this I would stop him. I would pick up that precious little angel and shake the motherfucker until his eyes rolled back. I’m praying for diarrhea because every minute this is in me is like knowing I’m carrying Jeff Goldblum’s baby from The Fly.
Max: Close your eyes, Mike.
Deadshirt staff writer. Conceived by the unholy union of Zeus (in the guise of a corn dog) and ED-209. Has written for City Paper, Courthouse News. Twitter famous.
Connect
Having read the entirety of the Trashford Files has turned a potentially soul-crushing day at work to something rather pleasant. Thank you for enduring pain so I didn’t have to.
Just sent a message to my Mexican pal mentioning this ‘Frito’s Chicken Enchilada Melt’ and telling him it sounds like a racist sandwich…I just had to look and see if anyone else thought food is starting to become really racist.
This is horses**t, i work at subway and i make the beest chicken enchillada melts. they look good and taste good, this review isn’t reliable. go out and try it yourself.