Grandma Loves You started in 2015, in Germany, as a family business with Sarah and Artin Davoodi, Sarah’s grandmother, and a bun in the oven. When the Davoodis immigrated to Canada, they opened a second location in Toronto to continue the tradition.

Sarah notes Grandma Loves You (GLY) pride themselves on treating customers with care; they want everyone who walks in to feel like they’re being cared for and nourishes while outside of their home. You’ll find that in their overstuffed sandwiches (don’t all grandmothers just want you to eat copious amounts of food?) and the little hand drawn hearts on the packaging.

From the number of customers who visited during my Friday lunch trip, I can see the community is reciprocating the love and has made GLY one of Yelp’s top 100 places to eat in Canada for 2022. There were couples, friends, families, and construction workers abound tucking into handheld creations. One client even acting as an ambassador as someone was trying to decide between GLY and the pizza place next door - sandwiches all the way!

GLY offers an extensive menu of submarines, sandwiches, hotdogs, and croissants. It can be difficult zeroing in on a choice, so I asked Sarah about her favourite items, which includes the gourmet French dog, chef’s choice sub, meatball sub, and the new BLT sub.

Since Sarah loves the subs, I opted for the Chef’s choice ($12.99 for the pictured 6 inch) that’s wrapped in a crunchy soft roll reminiscent of banh mi bread. It’s stuffed to the gills with toppings… I had to press and really stretch out the jaw to get the first bites in. The grilled chicken is neutrally seasoned allowing the house made sauces to shine through, blending into the fried onions to give the sandwich a real savouriness.

Not normally a fan of black olives, they work in the creation, becoming lost in the other ingredients so that it just adds a bit of saltiness. Pickled hot peppers provide interest to the sandwich without too much heat, and the creamy avocado holds everything together. It’s a sub with a lot of different textures and flavours. In other words, my kind of sub.

Same with the gourmet French dog ($9.49), which I was worried would be too sweet. Luckily, the blueberry preserve is more fruit than sugar helping to blend the other ingredients together without becoming the prominent flavour. If anything, the freshly grilled salty wiener comes through the most, GLY uses the long frankfurter that is surprisingly juicy for being a thinner dog. It becomes a “French” dog from the addition of brie, which when warm melts into the ultra soft croissant.

Having a sandwich for lunch seems so normal and overdone, but somehow GLY creates ones that are delicious and sought after. And to Sarah’s benefit, I could sense their care. Of course, I was invited in to try their food, so she made sure to take a few moments out of the crazy rush to answer my questions. But I also saw her invite people to take a seat at a table outside and bring orders out – walking around and calling out names to find the food’s rightful owner. She could have made people wait around for their order, but then that wouldn’t be the loving grandmother way.