Critic's Review
This location has moved to Sunrise Highway.
Review 7/3/14
Firehouse Subs was recently ranked the 2nd best fast food restaurant behind Chipotle by Consumer Reports, and my immediate reaction was "No Way". I don't remember liking it very much. I checked the review and realized that I hadn't been in here for almost 4 years. Maybe they'd gotten better? They were a pretty new franchise operation back then.
So while stocking my wine cooler, I stopped in for a meatball sub. The decor is about the same; they have some fireman gear up front and the Dalmatian themed tables that aren't as shiny and new as they were 4 years ago. They have the hot sauce bar, but I don't think about putting hot sauce on a sub.
One thing that's changed is the size of the subs; they used to have 8" and 12" and now they have 6" and 8". They've kept the prices about the same but you get a smaller sub. I ordered a 6" classic meatball. It took about 10 minutes for them to make the sub.
A nice looking sandwich. The take out menu I got shows the "medium" meatball at $5.69 but they charged my card $6.25, which means that they charged me $5.89. Not sure if they raised the price or just charged me too much.
They've been doing some clever if not deceptive marketing, planting these posters on Yelp and Urbanspoon.
I say deceptive because there doesn't seem to be an actual guarantee; there's no mention of it on their web page or facebook page. I can say with confidence that these aren't the best meatballs you've ever had, unless you've never had a meatball. In fact, the sandwich is pretty good except for the meatballs. The bread is a nice, soft roll and the cheese and sauce is pretty good, but the meatballs are tasteless and not very substantial. You can get a better meatball sub than this at just about any pizzeria in town.
There was 1 skinny pickle spear in the bag that I didn't even see until I went to throw it away. They used to give you 2 bigger ones; and pickles don't really go with meatballs.
Not bad for the price. You can't go wrong for $6 these days. But don't believe the posters.
Review 9/7/10
Firehouse Subs is a yet-another chain sub shop to land in Fort Lauderdale; this one in the Harbor Shops shopping center. The narrow space sports fire engine red decor, with dalmation spots on the tables. They have just about every hot or addon-on sauce that you can think of.
You can get an 8" or 12" sub on either white or wheat bread, with an optional pickle spear. I'm not sure why the pickle is optional as they don't charge extra for it, but I guess some people don't like it in the bag. The place is staffed with kids, and ordering can be very mechanical. For example if you ask for a meatball sub to go, they'll ask you if you want that to go. It's clear they're reading from a script.
I sampled an 8" meatball sub on white. The bread is very good; soft and not too chewy. The sub is a bit different than you might get from your local pizza joint; its light on the sauce, and light on the cheese also. The meatballs are small and managable with italian spices baked in. They're perfectly round, which implies they are from the freezer. Its not as impressive looking as the one on their web site, but for $5.95 it makes for a satisfying lunch. Note that they sprinkle "italian seasoning" on it, mostly oregano, so if you don't care for that you might consider asking them to leave it off.
On another visit I ordered an Italian Sub. They have a new promotion where you can get "double meat", which seems simple enough. But it proved to me a bit of a problem with an Italian sub. There was some serious banter between the cashier and the sandwich guy about how to handle it. I didn't quite understand it all, but I think the default was to charge me extra for each kind of meat on the sandwich. Why can't they just give you twice the amount they normally do? Isn't that what double meat means? But they ended up giving me double meat and only charging me an extra dollar, so I guess it came out in my favor. As you can see, its a pretty well-stuffed sandwich.
Again, it comes with a pickle. Its free so I took it. While I can't complain about the amount of meat in the sandwich, it just wasn't that good. It just didn't have the same flavor pop as the sub from Premo's I had last week. The cold cuts didn't have much taste. The tomato wasn't ripe. It was just too bland for such a stuffed Italian sub. A real yawner.
Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to a member function getUser() on null in /usr/local/www/sites/classes/comments-class.php:267 Stack trace: #0 /usr/local/www/sites/classes/comments-class.php(75): threadedComments->formatComment(Object(stdClass)) #1 /usr/local/www/sites/classes/comments-class.php(77): threadedComments->printParent(Array, 1) #2 /usr/local/www/sites/classes/comments-class.php(100): threadedComments->printParent(Array) #3 /usr/local/www/sites/comments.php(74): threadedComments->printComments(Array) #4 /usr/local/www/sites/single-post.php(208): require_once('/usr/local/www/...') #5 /usr/local/www/sites/post.php(22): include('/usr/local/www/...') #6 /usr/local/www/sites/index.php(173): include('/usr/local/www/...') #7 {main} thrown in /usr/local/www/sites/classes/comments-class.php on line 267