#73: Charley’s Grilled Subs

Just a couple things first off:

1. Charley’s Grilled Subs is a massively bigger chain than I realized
2. I brilliantly left home without a memory card in my DSLR, so this is an iPhone edition! (I even checked a few places in the mall for a small card on the spot but came up empty)

Since I ended up using my phone to take the photos for this post I was thinking I would eventually go back and do it properly, but now that I see how enormous a chain this is I’m just going to call this one final.  Anyway, obviously I went to Charley’s Grilled Subs tonight.  It’s located in the food court between Panda Express and Kai Hawaiian BBQ.  This is yet another cheesesteak focused business (no more cheesesteaks for a while, I promise!).  Similarly to the new Cheesesteak Shop they are using LCD displays for their menus, and with them they’ve made the same mistake and made the text size pretty small and difficult to read.  Standing about 6 feet back from the counter in line I was able to make out the titles of the items.  The descriptions were way too small though.  Once I got up to the counter I was able to focus in on them better and see what they were.  Here they have no paper take out menu (at least none that are sitting out front) so if you have trouble reading the menu you’re gonna have a bad time.

I decided on a small Bacon 3 Cheese Steak (steak, bacon, swiss, cheddar, provolone) and an order of the Buffalo & Bleu Gourmet Fries (perhaps a new or soon to be discontinued item, this does not appear on their website, it was fries with hot Buffalo sauce and blue cheese crumbles).  My cheesesteak was ready in about 3 minutes with the fries following by about a minute.  Both were hot and steaming as I sat down in the food court.  The fries were very crispy and the buffalo sauce looked and felt like molten lava, so I let that cool off a bit.

On my cheesesteak I went with most of the available toppings: onions, mushrooms, lettuce & tomato (though I changed my mind and removed it).  The roll was soft and tasty, though I doubt it was an Amoroso roll like the good places use, it didn’t seem to have the same texture.  The steak was fairly similar to the stuff I had at Cheesesteak Grille and Cheesesteak Shop, but maybe a bit less flavorful and moist.  With the swiss, cheddar and provolone however, it was a fine steak.  I don’t recall there being much in the way of onions, but the mushrooms were plentiful and excellent.  Thin strips of bacon were hidden deep in the roll, and I suspect they were the microwave variety due to their texture, but they had decent flavor.  I had hoped for more cheese since it was the “3 Cheese steak.”

 

I picked at the fries a bit in-between bites of the cheesesteak, but by the time I went full on into them after the steak was gone they were fairly soggy fries.  The Buffalo sauce was very bright orange, and a lot hotter than I expected (not temperature hot).  Consecutive bites required a follow up with a swig of Dr Pepper.  The blue cheese wasn’t as strong as I like but it was just strong enough to mello out the sauce when I got a big chunck with a few fries.  There isn’t quite enough to get one with every bite, so I found myself rationing them so that I had a couple good sized pieces to finish off the last of the fries with.  THese were pretty good, but nothing compared to the Urban Fries at Jack’s Urban Eats, which is what came to mind when I saw these on the menu.

All in all this wasn’t all that bad, considering it’s in a food court and I paid under $10 for the food and soda.  It’s not the best cheesesteak in Roseville by a long shot, but it’s worth checking out if you find yourself looking for a cheap bite while at the Galleria.

Website: http://www.charleys.com

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