ON our continuing mission to find takeaway food available in lockdown, suitable for all palates, this week the Gazette and Times staff decided to order their Thursday lunch from Subway, the sandwich chain which offers a bewildering range of types of bread, fillings, sauces, toppings and salads.

Gathering, suitably socially distanced in our generous office space, we set about wading through the huge range of menu options before placing our order via one of the several delivery apps which work with the chain.

Whether you’re a committed carnivore, devout vegetarian, vegan or coeliac with an extreme reaction to gluten, there will be something on this menu you can eat - though as we found, not all options are available to everyone.

Everyone went for footlong subs, which might sound huge but are actually completely manageable, though there is a six-inch option more suitable for children or those with small appetites. We all felt November was too cold for salads, and though wraps are available, everyone liked the idea of a toasted buns.

So we ordered a festive pig in blanket on seeded bread, with lettuce, peppers, crispy onions and garlic aoili on both sides; chicken tikka on white bread with lettuce and cucumber, with mayo; steak and cheese on seeded bread, with lettuce and cucumber and no dressing; a plant patty with peppers, lettuce, and lots of other salads and vegan dressing.

Two bags of plain crisps and a packet of baked cheese and onion crisps, a delicious-sounding Cadbury Caramel muffin, a chocolate and orange cookie and two double chocolate chip cookies, with a Pepsi Max, Robinson’s raspberry and apple drink and two Tropicana orange juices completed the feast, which came in at just over £40 with the delivery charge.

Subway's packaging rivals Amazon's for getting a small item into a large box. It did ensure, though, that the toasted subs were still warm and unsquashed. The drinks had clearly come out of the chiller and the cookies were intact..

We tucked in, and the verdicts were: chicken tikka, good quality chicken but too heavy on the lettuce; steak and cheese, again a little light on steak but still very tasty; plant patty, delicious, and not at all dry (a common fault with vegan food); pig in blanket tasty sausage hot all the way through, but wearing a very thin blanket of barely discernable bacon.

It's not that these sandwiches are poor value for money, more that the carefully taken shots on their website lead you to expect a more generous level of filling.

Everyone agreed the buns would have been better if they had been properly toasted, so they had a crisp outside and soft inside. All ours seemed to have been merely warmed, so that by the time they got to us some of the bread had gone a bit soggy.

A colleague who claimed never to have eaten Subway in his life before wondered if they had been microwaved, but those of us who use the store regularly assured him that no, we were sure the sandwich artists had put them in the pulldown toasters, as they should.

The cookies and muffin were yummy, but it was a shame nothing pudding-y was vegan friendly - we weren't sure about the GF options, either.

Alison Phillips

Subway

Branches in Trowbridge, Warminster, Chippenham, Devizes, Melksham, Royal Wootton Bassett

www.subway.com

check website for local store no for phone ordering

Our ratings:

Delivery speed: 10/10

Food: 7/10

Suitable for all: 8/10