Hero,
54 York Street,
Belfast,
BT15 1AS.
The calendar turning over to a new year makes it difficult not to think back and wonder just where the time has gone. Can we really be about the wrap up the first quarter of the 21st century? Is it actually nine years since the world lost David Bowie? Can it be pushing half-a-decade since the Irish Supreme Court declared the stuff Subway make their sandwiches with is essentially cake?
In a legal decision that deserves to stand with the great precedents in the history of jurisprudence, in October 2020 five judges in Dublin declared there was too much sugar in the American sandwich chain’s foot-long loaves for them to be considered bread.
And it wasn’t even close, it was five times the limit in some cases, meaning it falls into the ‘confectionery or fancy baked goods’ category. So, basically, cake.
I have to say that the odd Subway would comfortably fall into the category of ‘guilty pleasure’ if I ever felt remotely guilty about such things.
In the same way a Big Mac is hardly the apex of burger craft but is loaded with the stuff that makes one hard to put down, that sugar rush is key to the appeal of something there are clearly better examples of out there. Much better. No comparison better.
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To the point that it feels mildly insulting to begin a review of Hero subs on the edge of Belfast city centre by talking about a behemoth chain that is really only superficially in the same business.
But Hero has also cracked the code of a sandwich you can’t turn away from – and not because it’s got you hepped up on anything other than bang-on ingredients, prepared and put together brilliantly well.
New Yorker Harry Wang met his now-wife, Northern Ireland native Katie, in the Big Apple and moved here over a decade ago.
The pair opened frozen yogurt business Spoon Street which they expanded before selling in 2019.
The next step was to bring an authentic taste of his home city to Belfast, but the pandemic intervened to delay Hero’s planned opening in 2020.
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With the relocated Ulster University belatedly taking shape in the area around Hero’s proposed home, the small sandwich shop – there’s a counter and a few seats at the window – eventually opened at the end of 2023.
Along with chef and family friend Brent Muendesi, the Wangs have put together a focused and fantastic offering of humongous sandwiches, great torpedoes of things, rammed with all the good stuff.
At between a tenner and £12.50 it’s a lot of money for a sandwich, but it’s a lot of sandwich for the money. They are huge. Easily shareable and impressively resilient if you want to stretch them out to another meal. The bill at the end of this does both those things in an effort to give the menu as thorough a going over as possible. And the menu really does invites such diligence.
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The bread, made off-site but to Hero’s specifications, does exceptionally well to hold everything together, while itself being an excellent little loaf.
The fillings are inventive, but not for the sake of it, and the quality of the ingredients is apparent.
Crispy chicken cutlets feature prominently, and there’s a sweet and spicy tang to the Dragon, which has the poultry combined with pickled cabbage as well as oozing mozzarella sticks – because why not? – and garlic butter seeping into that good bread.
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The Overachiever is a gorgeous Italian-American inspired combination with melting oblongs of crisp-coated aubergine (we’ll forgive the New Yorker calling it ‘eggplant’) roasted peppers, pesto and sun-dried tomato mayonnaise.
The TCS suffers the problem of most cold sandwiches with a chopped, sauced filling. It all gets a bit samey after a while – although the actual stuff in this – with turkey, bacon, salami and cream cheese prominent – can’t be faulted.
Having said that, the similar hot melange of minced beef, cheese, crispy onions, chives, and their slightly sweet, slightly warming Heff sauce on the Heffer manages to avoid that problem. Maybe because, despite its size, it doesn’t hang around long enough to overstay its welcome.
Disco fries are good, thin chips slipping and sliding round a bath of chicken gravy and melty cheese, while the loaded Couch fries come in this case covered in an excellent example of vegan mince, tangy ranch sauce and a hot sauce that will take the face off you. In a good way.
If there’s a precedent for high-level sub sandwiches in Belfast, then Hero is setting it. And if there really is such a thing as a guilty pleasure then Hero’s exceptional sandwiches must qualify. And there’s not a court in the land that could disagree.
The bill
Dragon sub £12
Overachiever sub £10.50
Heffer sub £12
TCS sub £10
Disco fries £6.50
The Couch fries £8.50
Total £59.50
