Did you think that I would never, ever be done talking about lobster and lobster rolls? You might be right. A summer with trips to both the American northeast and Nova Scotia would be woefully incomplete for me, despite all of its charms and treasures, if it weren’t also a fully loaded lobster pilgrimage. So even though I made quite the pig of myself eating as many lobster rolls as I could lay hands upon while dashing through Maine, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania, I had no compunction about keeping my eyes—and jaws—open for further lobster attractions on reaching Halifax.

This being my first visit to the Canadian Maritimes, I didn’t know for certain what to expect in this regard, although I was confident there would be some place I could get a bit of fresh Canadian (Atlantic) lobster. What I didn’t in the least expect was that it would be at the local outpost, right next door to our hotel, of a continent-wide and not especially high-end fast food submarine sandwich chain. That’s right: fresh lobster salad at SubWay. I’m just gonna go on record as saying that I have a new dash of respect for SubWay.

I like sandwiches and eat them reasonably often, but SubWay had fallen very low on the roster of places I opted to find my fix when I wasn’t making my own sammies. There are, in addition to any number of bistros and soup-and-sandwich specialty shops and cafes nearly everywhere in the western world these days, plenty of competing sandwich chains and most of them, in my opinion, more reliable for fresh ingredients and those, not as heavily processed as what I was getting for a while at SubWay stores. If this apparently annual offering of lobster salad (lobster meat with a minimum of mayonnaise binding it) ever moved close to where I was living, I would have to change my stance entirely, at least during the lobster event.

This is not to say that their sandwich would supplant, or even fully competes with, the lobster rolls that became objects not only of admiration but outright obsession at such places as Neptune in Boston—this, boosted, admittedly, by the house’s swell hand-cut fries—and Libby’s in Brunswick—my current chief heartthrob of lobster roll-dom, on the strength of a butter-toasted bun, options for cold-with-mayo or hot-with-melted-butter, and most importantly, the unsurpassable fresh and sweet perfection and massive quantity of lobster meat—these will not be usurped in the lobster roll pantheon by a mere sub shop lobster salad sandwich. But I owe the corporate sandwich emporium sincere admiration and kudos for giving an affordable and eminently edible, credible lobster sandwich. Not anyone’s run of the mill SubWay offering, that.

And if the chiller is refilled by the next lunchtime when I’m near enough to do it, I’ll buy it again. Because, as I’ve said before: Lobster.