Mr. Sub first planned as donut shop

SANDPOINT — Trying to imagine Sandpoint without Mr. Sub is a little like watching Jimmy Stewart in a scene from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” as George Bailey gets a glimpse of what Bedford Falls would look like without him around.

Had it not been for a chance lunch break in the early 1980s, one of the area’s most popular food stops would have been a donut shop instead.

“The original name was going to be ‘On the Corner Donuts,’ ” said Mike Brown, whose father, Walt, opened Mr. Sub in 1983. “It’s a good thing we didn’t go with that, or I wouldn’t have a job today.”

Walt had some history in the donut business, having run three such shops in Bend, Ore., before a divorce ended that chapter of his life. When he made a road trip through Sandpoint in 1981 with his teenage son, Mike, along for the ride, the two got an eyeful of Lake Pend Oreille and a head full of ideas.

“We were both fishermen, so we fell in love with the lake,” said Mike, adding that his dad told him that donut shop hours would guarantee they had plenty of time to reel in their catch. “We would work from 3 a.m.-2 p.m. and then spend the rest of the afternoon fishing.”

The following year, father and son returned to Sandpoint in search of a place to open shop. The region was clamped in the teeth of a recession, as Mike recalls, and business owners fairly begged the pair to move into their space and let them off the hook. They stopped into what was then Modern Cleaners to do their laundry, struck up a conversation with the owner, and had a deal in place almost before their clothes were dry.

“He told us, ‘If you take over my lease, you’ve got it,’” Mike said. “So we ended up with the building in one day.”

Once the dry cleaning equipment, washers and dryers were cleared out, the new owners set about installing display cases and booths for the donut shop. Their next stop was a restaurant supply firm in Spokane, where they would buy the rest of the gear they needed.

And that’s where the story takes a turn.

“We stopped at a Kmart for lunch and in the deli case was a foot-long ‘hero’ sandwich,” Mike said. “We were amazed — we’d never seen a sandwich that big. At that point, we thought, ‘We could do this.’”

With the donut concept shot full of holes and giant sandwiches on their minds, the two continued on to the restaurant supply store with a different purpose. They brainstormed for names as they drove, coming up short until they passed a tuxedo rental business.

“We drove by Mr. Tux and said, ‘There’s our name — Mr. Sub,’” Mike recalled.

For recession-bound Sandpoint in the early ’80s, however, the idea of a sub shop was a couple of years before its time. Mike worked for the first 18 months without a paycheck, going to class at Sandpoint High School during the day and working into the wee hours with his father just to keep the shop afloat. To generate extra income, they took over a café at the Henley Aerodrome — now the location of Silverwood Theme Park — changed the name to the Wingover Restaurant and changed the menu to steak house fare. Within six months, that eatery was making a profit and making it possible to keep the Mr. Sub doors open.

“That’s when things broke loose,” Mike said. “In the third year, we started making money hand over fist here and there was a line out the door.”

He chalks it up to a combination of the recession drawing to a close and Mr. Sub’s proprietary oil and vinegar dressing — a tasty condiment that created a word-of-mouth buzz for the sub shop.

At about the same time, the shop began to offer delivery service to local businesses. To this day, that clientele still makes up 80 percent of all sandwich deliveries, with the remainder going to private residences. Mike remembers one of the early sandwich deliveries to what, at the time, was a fledgling mail-order operation.

“It was for Coldwater Creek and, back then, it was just Dennis and Ann Pence and one employee,” he said. “They didn’t have any extra money to tip us, so they gave me a little box of huckleberry chocolates from their two-page catalog.”

The golden age of Mr. Sub started in 1985, when Helga Aldrich dropped by looking for a job, was hired as manager and stayed on for the next 14 years. Some of the best-selling sandwiches then remain favorites to this day, with the spicy Italian sub always coming in at or near the front of the pack. The later introduction of the turkey, bacon & cheddar sub was an instant success and that option has stayed on the best-seller list since it was added to the menu.

After Mike married his wife, Darra, his father encouraged the couple to find ways to make Mr. Sub their own. When Walt passed away, they made some upgrades to the restaurant’s interior, but left the menu and the food model intact.

According to Darra, the shop’s dedication to serving locally baked bread, fresh produce and mostly local meats — the salami, for instance, comes from Wood’s Meat Processing — has set Mr. Sub apart.

“We’ve never scrimped or skimped on the quality of food we serve and that has a lot of staying power,” she said. “In other places, the sandwiches have gotten smaller or thinner. Here, a six-inch sandwich is still a six-inch sandwich; a 12-inch is still a 12-inch.”

Mr. Sub has employed a couple of generations of Sandpoint kids during its more then 30 years in business, as well as Mike and Darra’s three children and her brother, Billy Cole, who, after eight years, holds the record of being the only driver who has never had an accident in the shop’s delivery vehicle. Many of those former employees make the sub shop a pilgrimage stop when they come back home, often introducing their own kids to the sandwich menu for the first time.

But one doesn’t have to be a relative to be part of the Mr. Sub family, Darra noted, adding that the couple’s daily meet-ups with longtime sandwich buyers creates a similar kind of bond.

“Our customers are so loyal, they’re now part of the family,” she said, turning around to pull a small frame from the wall. Under the glass are several rows of completed Mr. Sub punch cards, each worth a free sandwich. The frame was a birthday present to Darra from a customer named Bill, who buys the same sandwich every day — now officially designated “The Bill Sandwich” — and never redeems his cards.

“He has so many of them I think he’s afraid that, if he ever cashed them in, we’d go bankrupt,” Mike joked.

Mr. Sub, located at 602 N. Fifth Ave., is open Monday-Friday from 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Saturday from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. and closed Sundays.

For information and delivery, call (208) 263-3491.