Gaetano's Sub Shop #2: Italian Subs and a Chicago Dog on Murray's State Street

If you have lived in Salt Lake long enough to remember when State Street was the spine the whole valley still ran on, you remember the original Gaetano's Sub Shop — the dark brick building at 1618 South State Street, across from Salt Lake Community College, with the tasteful graffiti on either side, nestled between a tattoo parlor and a used car dealership. It's been there since the 1970s. The long-time customers — and there are a lot of them — will tell you they started coming in the seventies, kept coming through three changes of ownership, and watched the shop quietly hold its place as one of Salt Lake's best Italian sub operations through every wave of fast-casual chain expansion that Subway, Jimmy John's, and Jersey Mike's threw at it.

When Curtis De Lagerheim took over the original Gaetano's a few years back, the long-time regulars noticed. "Never disappoints, and since Curtis took over, it's gotten even better," reads one of the reviews that runs through every aggregator. In February 2021, Curtis opened the second location — Gaetano's Sub Shop #2 at 5823 South State Street in Murray — and within four years it has accumulated a Google rating of 4.5 stars across 840 reviews, the highest review count of any operation I'm writing about this month.

That 840-review number matters. It's not a number you accumulate at a Salt Lake sub shop unless the regulars are actually showing up week after week. The Yelp listing for the Murray location was updated in September 2025 with 17 reviews and 17 photos. The DoorDash menu is active. Postmates is active. ezCater handles the catering side. Every review thread reads roughly the same: the bread is the difference, the Italian sub is the order, the Chicago Dog is the unexpected detour, and the staff knows the regulars by name.

The Sub That Builds the Shop

Curtis sources his ingredients locally as a matter of operational principle, and the most important sourcing relationship is the one that almost nobody else in the Salt Lake sub-sandwich economy has bothered to build: the bread comes fresh every morning from Salt City Baking Company. Salt City is one of the artisan-bakery operations that has emerged out of Salt Lake's last decade of craft-food expansion — small, careful, the kind of bakery that doesn't sell to the chain sandwich operations. The bread shows up at Gaetano's every morning, gets sliced for the day's subs, and the shop sells out of it by close.

That sourcing decision is the technical reason Gaetano's is better than the chain competition. A sub is bread first, fillings second. Subway runs proofed-and-baked-on-site bread that's identical from Sandy to Bountiful. Jimmy John's runs its own bread program. Jersey Mike's slices its own meats to order, but the bread is the same daily-baked production loaf at every store. None of them are pulling craft-bakery bread off a delivery truck each morning. Gaetano's is. The bread is what reviewers describe when they say "best bread around" — not because the kitchen makes it, but because the kitchen made the smart upstream choice.

The Italian is the sub that built the shop. Three sliced meats — hard salami, pepperoni, and capicola — stacked on a 6" or 10" loaf, layered with multiple slices of provolon, fresh tomatoes, red onion, shredded lettuce, a measured amount of mayonnaise, and a finishing splash of Gaetano's house sub dressing (oil, vinegar, dried herbs). The dressing is the move. Most cold-cut Italian subs read salty without the acidic counterweight. Gaetano's dressing punches the salinity back and pulls the whole sandwich into balance. "Best Italian sub in the valley, hands down," reads one review thread; the verdict holds.

The Muffaletta is the menu's secondary statement. The traditional New Orleans muffaletta is sesame-seeded round-loaf bread, mortadella, salami, ham, provolone, and the olive-and-giardiniera tapenade that's the soul of the sandwich. Gaetano's version makes one deliberate substitution: capicola instead of ham. That's not a corner-cutting move. It's a recognition that capicola — the seasoned, slow-cured pork shoulder cut — has more flavor depth than deli ham, and that it pairs better with the olive tapenade than the milder ham does. The result is a muffaletta with more savory weight than the original, and a sandwich that defenders of the New Orleans version sometimes prefer to the original.

The Meatball Sub is the kitchen's technical showcase. House meatballs, sliced provolone, shredded parmesan, a thick marinara. The meatball-to-sauce-to-bread ratio is the dial that most meatball subs get wrong — too much sauce and the sub becomes a soggy mess, too little and the meatball reads dry. Gaetano's has the ratio dialed. The B.L.T. is the sleeper — hot, crispy, plentiful bacon; fresh tomato; lettuce; the right amount of mayo. The B.L.T. is the order if you've already eaten three subs from the rotation and want to see whether the kitchen can land a sandwich that has nowhere to hide behind cured meats and cheese. It can.

And then there's the Chicago Dog. Not a sub. A quarter-pound all-beef dog, split and grilled on a toasted bun, with yellow mustard, sweet relish, a single dill pickle spear, grilled onions, a slice of fresh tomato, and a scatter of diced onion. Worthy of any Windy City native's praise, wrote SLUG Magazine. Finding a proper Chicago dog in Utah is almost as hard as finding a proper bagel — most operations either don't bother or get the construction wrong. Gaetano's is one of the few in the valley that nails it. The Italian-beef tradition runs deep at the original Gaetano's, and the Chicago Dog is the bridge between the Italian-deli identity and the Italian-Chicago lunch-counter tradition that built operations like Portillo's.

The Murray #2 Location and Why It Matters

The original Gaetano's at 1618 South State is a Salt Lake City institution. The Murray #2 location at 5823 South State is the expansion — same recipes, same bread, same dressing, same staff training, four miles south on the same street. The opening in February 2021 put Gaetano's in the heart of Murray's State Street commercial strip, a few blocks from the Murray Theater, equidistant between the Murray and Cottonwood Heights neighborhoods. For everyone who lives south of 4500 South, the Murray location made the regular Italian sub a five-minute drive instead of a fifteen.

The Murray location is set up the same way the original is. Casual seating, the Italian-deli red-checker table tops, windows looking out at State Street. Open Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Sunday. The catering side runs through ezCater for the corporate parties and the office lunch orders that have made Gaetano's a regular in the Salt Lake catering rotation.

The Murray location also matters because it's filling a Murray-specific niche. State Street in Murray is a high-density commercial corridor — chain restaurants, gas stations, big-box retail, the Intermountain Healthcare hospital campus to the east — and it had no serious Italian-deli operation before Gaetano's #2 moved in. Pat's Barbecue handles the BBQ niche. Sea Salt and Curry in Sugar House handle the seafood. The chain sub competition was the only sub option in Murray until 2021. Gaetano's filled that gap and now does it at the highest review volume in the local sub category.

Salt Lake's Italian Deli Tradition

Italian-American food in Salt Lake has a stranger history than most people know. The first Italian immigrants showed up in the late 1800s, working on the railroads and in the mines, and by the early twentieth century there was a small but visible Italian community on the west side and in Helper and Carbon County. Most of the surviving Italian-American operations in the valley — Caputo's Market in Sugar House, Settebello, Stoneground Italian, Reginato, Pago — are 1990s-or-later operations. The pre-1990s Italian-deli operations are mostly gone. Gaetano's at 1618 South State is one of the few that survived from the seventies into the present day, and Curtis De Lagerheim's stewardship has now extended that lineage with a second location in Murray.

That continuity is what makes Gaetano's worth writing about. It's the Italian-deli equivalent of what Meier's BBQ in Holladay does for the BBQ-catering scene — a multi-decade operation that quietly held its place through the chain-restaurant takeover of the 2000s and is now growing through a second-generation operator who understands what made the original work.

Planning Your Order

The Murray #2 address is 5823 South State Street, Murray, UT 84107. The phone is (385) 425-3516. The original Salt Lake location is 1618 South State Street, Salt Lake City, UT 84115 at (801) 467-3676. Both share the website gaetanosslc.com. Murray hours run Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Sunday. Order on DoorDash, Postmates, or Grubhub; book catering through ezCater. The Instagram is @gaetanos.subs.murray for the Murray location and @gaetanos.sub.shop for the original.

What to order on a first visit: the Italian Sub is the obligation — a 10" if you're feeding two, a 6" with a side if you're solo. Add the Chicago Dog for the unexpected combination. Order the Muffaletta if you have a New Orleans memory or want to see what a smart capicola substitution does to the original. Save the Meatball for the second visit when you have time to sit. The B.L.T. is the third-visit order. Don't skip the Italian Beef if it's on that day's menu — the Italian-Chicago crossover is the most underrated thing on the board.

This is why we live here. Salt Lake's sub-sandwich scene has been dominated by chain operations for the past two decades, and the few independents that have survived — Gaetano's, Even Stevens before it pivoted, the Caputo's deli counter — are doing the kind of sourcing and execution that makes the chain options look exactly as undistinguished as they are. Gaetano's #2 in Murray is one of the highest review volumes in the Salt Lake sub category for a reason. Local bread. Curtis De Lagerheim. Five decades of brand history. Italian sub, Chicago Dog, capicola muffaletta. State Street, four miles south of the original.