“Old world food — new world spin.” That’s the tag line of Spinners Sandwich company, a new franchise hopeful that recently opened south of St. Clair on Yonge.

As a number of romantically historical portraits hanging on the walls will tell you, it’s the Mediterranean equivalent to the American hamburger — shawarmas, donairs and gyros — that supposedly comprise the “old world” part of the equation here. 

Set amid the sleek, modern, fast food decor of the place, the signs are a clever bit of marketing, setting up a connection with the past that taps into the current back-to-the-campfire cooking zeitgeist quite ably. Ignore the disposable packaging and generic pre-fab modular look of the place, they seem to say, there is real food being prepared behind the curtain here.

The spin? According to the staff, it’s that they’re slapping fries into the wraps for you. (Except, of course, in the cases where they forget to — as is the case with two out of three sandwiches that I order.)

The sandwiches, or “spinners,” as they call them, all come served up on soft, lightly toasted pita bread and they aren’t half bad. If you’re looking for a little something different than burgers or subs, you could do much worse. The addition of a few fried potato sticks on the chicken spinner ($6.49) manages not to be a complete disaster. And the combination of sweet garlic and Frank’s RedHot sauces along with red onions, tomatoes and parsley is actually quite good in combo with the rubbery fat- and bone-free bird that comes on it. It would have worked even better, however, if it came on the beef/lamb gyro ($5.49) wrap as ordered.

The zippy hummus and tahini yogurt  that I’d picked out to snuggle with the chicken turns the ruminant spinner into a texture nightmare, with the cumin-spiced meat smooshing together with grainy chickpea spread sparking a bad trip down memory lane involving Wonder Bread and something my aunt liked to call “ham paté.” Jarred pickled beets add a little flair to the decently tender beef spinner ($5.99). These attributes are overcome by the overly sweet Diana’s BBQ sauce, which makes this sandwich worthy of its own space on a board of Candy Land.

Mess-ups aside, the sandwiches are filling and decent. You can get a better one with a pop to boot for $1 less at College Falafel, but there isn’t anything horribly wrong with them. The same can’t be said of the salads.

What does a pile of pre-cut greens topped with generic, excessively salty feta and bland, flavourless canned black olive slices need added to it to be named a Greek salad ($6.99)? If you’re the folks at Spinners, the answer is a little bag of Hellman’s Blue Ribbon creamy Greek vinaigrette. For $2.99 extra, you can add four falafel pucks to make it a “veggie dinner” — a misnomer if there ever was one. Ten bucks for what essentially amounts to a low-carb falafel wouldn’t make sense, even at a place where they are making the food being served. It makes even less sense at Spinners where, judging by the evidence of my visit, the idea of cooking involves a lot of tearing the tops off of boxes and mixing the contents with water. The half-dressed Caesar salad ($6.99) with grocery store croutons is worse still. The Romaine lettuce may count as “old world” authentic. The smattering of grocery store croutons and parmesan certainly does not.

Usually, when you’re looking to hit chain gold, you start with quality. The care and love you put into your product translates into word-of-mouth buzz, which then translates into more bums in the seats. It’s after that happens, when you need to figure out a way to standardize your product across a multi-store format, that the corners start getting cut. Spinners seems to have decided to skip that first step, going straight to the heart of mediocrity. Still, I can see why they chose the slogan they did. “Spinners Sandwich Company — it will make you less hungry, at least” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.