Emory Village has two sandwich shops on North Decatur Road — one is corporate, the other is charm.
When entering Emory Village, you can fulfill a sandwich craving at Jimmy John’s, a national chain, or walk another 400 feet and land at Dave’s Cosmic Subs, gifting you an experience along with your sandwich.
The original Dave’s Cosmic Subs was founded in 1997 by Dave Lombardy in Chagrin, Ohio. Lombardy was a rock ‘n’ roll performer who always craved a good sandwich while on tour.
In addition to the Emory Village location, Dave’s Cosmic Subs has 18 locations in Ohio and one each in California and Vermont. The Dave’s in Emory Village was born 20 years ago when an original franchise owner, Joel Marcus, moved to Atlanta and brought Dave’s with him, anticipating the unique sub shop would thrive in the South. It has been standing in the same building ever since.
Emory Village’s Dave’s is made up of two parts: a compact, white brick building where customers place orders, and an outside tented area for seating. Out front, Dave’s is labeled by a humble, wooden “Dave’s Cosmic Subs” sign. Its face is slightly splintered, and the paint is faded. Its curly red lettering mimics the font of the interior walls’ ‘60s music festival posters.
The interior walls are painted bright red, covered with colorful posters of artists including the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. They are displayed in identical black frames, creating a crisp uniformity — a stark contrast to what this wall looked like two years ago when current owner Stephen Mase took over. The red was once a yellowed white, smothered in graffiti, vulgar phrases and scribbles in permanent marker.
“The inside looked like a toilet,” Mase said. “It needs to have a little personality, but there's a difference between personality and it being a dump.”
The open-air seating area is enveloped by yellow tenting coated in dust. The main entrance is an opening in the tent fronted by two skinny yellow-outlined, plastic-windowed doors. The right one is always open, often dancing in unison with the wind.
While Mase had aspirations for painting a mural on the drab outside of the building, he is not allowed to because the property is part of the DeKalb Historical Building Society, which prohibits him from doing anything to the exterior walls of the building.
He has learned to accept the building’s tattered exterior and appreciates it as something that people have come to know and recognize. It gives the shop “personality” — an attribute their neighbor Jimmy John’s lacks.
“It's the individuality that’s our allure,” Mase continued, his crystal blue eyes piercing through thick black glasses.
Based on what Mase was handed, he is just proud of being able to transform trash into charm. He painted over the interior graffiti and made one wall a chalkboard, which acts as a monthly community art project.
The wall has been a hit among college students, who use it to “profess their love to somebody or draw a penis or something,” Mase said with a chuckle and a quick eye roll.
February’s mural was full of colorful flowers, a beady-eyed cat, a heart with the initials “B+S” inside and “I heart Caroline” running across the wall, written in massive pink letters.
An oversized menu board is on the red wall, across from the chalk mural. It displays an immense list of sandwiches and a smaller list of salads. The font is thick and red, outlined in a thin yellow shadow, creating the illusion of an electric neon sign.
The best seller is “The Original Dave’s Cosmic Sub— The #1.” This signature sub includes a blend of Italian meats and is topped with veggies and cheese, all “smothered” with Dave’s Cosmic Sauce, a beloved creamy vinaigrette that customers repeatedly inquire about buying in bulk.
“It's No. 1 for a reason,” Mase said. “It’s simple. It makes sense. Give the people what they want.”
This sentiment is consistently at the forefront of Mase’s mind. He said that when distributors raised prices on top-tier sandwich ingredients during the pandemic, he did not settle for lower quality ingredients to save money. Dave’s prioritizes the customers.
Customers spend most of their Dave’s experience under the tent. Time inside the restaurant is limited to placing an order, and maybe a quick scribble on the chalkboard. After ordering, customers are handed a buzzer and directed outside to the seating area to await the buzzer’s piercing ping that beckons them back inside.
Outside, the only lingering sense of the ‘60s is the music. Mase repurposed two old phones that play classic rock music through Bluetooth speakers. He needed to compromise his definition of what constitutes classic rock when choosing a satellite radio station. Mase shakes his head, lamenting that the station earlier played a song by the band Poison, which he believes “technically wouldn’t qualify” as classic rock.
Mase wonders if Dave’s young clientele appreciates or even recognizes any of this music, as most of the songs played are much older than many customers.
“Are we alienating our customers?,” Mase asked. “Maybe it’s just a noise that's coming out of the speaker for them.”
Ultimately, people still come through the door. The shop’s busiest time is lunch hour, between 11:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m., when the ordering line often snakes out of the building and into the seating area. Hungry strangers are packed close together. There are dull murmurs of “Are you in line?” and “Sorry, ‘scuse me.”
Thin men in dress shirts, loafers and slacks pace around, clutching their buzzers. They holler into their phones, while donning AirPods, disturbing the peaceful haven with their dreadful logistics.
The businessmen's stiffness is especially apparent against a woman with electric blue hair and tattooed arms, another with dangling eyeball earrings and a third with spiky orange hair who proudly declares, “I’ll take the large, I’m a big girl!”
Emory University Hospital workers in scrubs are also common at Dave’s, decompressing and meeting strangers’ gazes with kind eyes and a slow smile. Emory students, sporting backpacks and Greek-lettered hoodies linger in their seats, relishing a study break.
Seated customers are obstacles in the paths of UberEats and DoorDash drivers who rush in and out in under 30 seconds.
Garrett Webb, associate director of development for campus life and athletics, and Cale Padgett, Emory’s lead director of gift planning, sit at a corner table facing the street. Webb wears sunglasses and an Emory Athletics polo, and Padgett sports a striped polo and a long, reddish beard that matches his salmon khakis.
“When I’m feeling a good sandwich, this is the place I’ll come to,” Webb said, waving around his black sunglasses as he spoke. “It’s probably the best sandwich spot around Emory.” He claimed Dave’s is “100%, hands down” better than Jimmy John’s.
For the lunchtime operation, efficiency is key. The staff is small in numbers, but mighty in ability. Employees are taught to work the register as well as in the kitchen, so every need is met, regardless of who is working on any given day.
The ordering counter doubles as a barrier between the customers and the kitchen. The kitchen is very small, so “the use of space is at a premium,” Mase said.
By 3 p.m., lunch is over, and by 8:30 p.m., a half hour before closing, Dave’s is almost vacant. The last 30 minutes bring sparse business, peppered with a few people coming in for pickup.The yellow door rapidly flaps, like a ghostly entrance to a haunted house. Customers are not there for dinner, but that is okay; business is not hurting.
There is no reason to change anything about this place. It’s simple, but it works. It’s clean, but it’s got character. It’s old, but it serves the young. It’s small, but it’s got a big heart.
“If you're going to be a restaurant, know what you want to be and be that,” Mase declared. “Don't try to be all things to all people, because then you become nothing to everybody.”
