We do have a few decent sandwich places and a couple okay delis, but this isn't the east coast. Chains dominate for the most part.
I haven't been completely blown away by Jersey Mike's, mostly because their staff has been brain dead teenagers who can't hardly make a sandwich the way you ask for it. If they used what they had better and moved at regular human speed I'd probably like them a lot more.
Kneaders (I think it's a local chain) makes good sandwiches but they don't have deli meat and they are pricey. If they made an italian sandwich I'd be there a lot more.
Jimmy Johns is okay, but yeah, national chain that makes pretty meh sandwiches. These guys won't put more than five pepper slices on your sandwich no matter how much you beg.
I now work within a 3min walk of a local deli chain, Knickerbockers. They are pretty damn good. But there's only a couple of them in the valley. The location I go to is pretty much slammed from open to close with both in-store customers and catering. I think they do a dozen large catering orders every lunch. So the staff is 100% on point, getting **** done.
I know there's some legit delis downtown. I can't remember the name but there's a good German deli. But again, this is Salt Lake, not New Jersey or NYC, not even L.A. or Chicago. Good places have a hard time here competing with large national chains because the majority of people here want the homogenized version of a good deli sandwich, and people in Utah are cheap AF, so you give them half the quality for 80% of the price and they are all over it. Hard for a good deli to compete.
