Incredible sandwiches fly out of this impossibly small suburban Calif. stand

Space is at a premium at DeFranko’s Submarines. The tiny, nearly 50-year-old sandwich shop is a squat rectangle measuring no more than 10 feet across and 18 feet deep. It’s all but impossible to have more than a dozen people inside at a time — and that includes five stools set into the floor for hungry customers.

Out of a need for efficiency, everything happens fast here. Customers stand shoulder to shoulder during the lunch rush, calling out orders for turkey or ham and cheese subs. Bags of chips are dropped into takeout bags, and the phone never seems to stop ringing. Above the din of the daytime crush, two words can be almost constantly heard:

“Yes. Yes.”

It only takes one trip to DeFranko’s to know exactly what that means.

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Is it possible to be both legendary and unknown? DeFranko’s, tucked up against the private (and celebrity-packed) Van Nuys Airport in LA’s San Fernando Valley, certainly tests the theory. The restaurant has been run nonstop for half a century, with owner Dru Alexander making nearly every single sub sandwich herself from a prep table and cooler in the middle of the restaurant. Outside the large pane windows, the Los Angeles basin has exploded its population, with endless restaurants coming and going across those decades. Inside there is Alexander, who has been standing in the same place since she was 21 years old.

“I still enjoy it,” the bubbly 71-year-old Alexander tells SFGATE by phone. “I love making people happy. I’m getting older, I can see myself getting more limited, but I still have more in me.”

Alexander is a powerhouse. Her energy would light up any room; it’s just that she has chosen to spend her time in this one, where it’s almost possible to touch the opposing walls just by stretching out your arms. Hundreds of times per day, Alexander pivots on small feet to take orders for cold cut combos, turkey subs and tuna salad. She flips back in a whirl of color, packing each with the requisite toppings and add-ons. Every sub here gets the finishing works: a squirt of Italian dressing, a shake of dried herb seasonings, and handfuls of extra chunky chopped onion, tomato and pickle. Takeout orders come with a handful of napkins and a plastic spoon for dragging up all of the inevitable fallen bits.

That phrase, “Yes. Yes,” is ever-present.

“People would come in and order the pastrami,” Alexander says of her top-selling sub, “and I just got tired of asking the same questions. We were just too busy.” Some snappy shorthand was needed.

The first “yes” means the large sub will get mustard, the second “yes” means it will have cheese on top. Technically, “No Yes” and “Yes No” combinations are possible, but the “Yes Yes” is by far the fan favorite, though Alexander prefers the pepper steak.

It is possible at DeFranko’s to walk in, make eye contact with Alexander, say only the words “Yes Yes” and leave moments later with a meal in hand, having paid and been pushed happily back out the door.

A finished sub from DeFranko’s, set on a seeded roll and heaped with chopped toppings, looks unlike anything else that greater Los Angeles has to offer. And in a county with 10 million residents and about 40,000 places to eat, that’s saying something.

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Alexander has been handing out subs and smiles since 1974, the year DeFranko’s debuted. She was not the original owner, but rather a family friend who stepped in to help and just never left. “It was an instant hit,” Alexander says of those early months. The stress of running a restaurant (even one this small) proved to be too much for the founders, and Alexander stepped in to take over just six months after opening. She was a single mother, fleeing a doomed relationship, and the work was more than meaningful — it was deeply necessary.

“I was scared,” Alexander says. “I didn’t want to give it up. I had a kid to raise.”

Early on, Alexander had help from her mother, but by 1979 (and for 10 straight years) she ran the place entirely alone. She would spend all day taking the next order over her shoulder while working head down on the previous one. A call for a hot sub like meatball or pepper steak required Alexander to step into the “back,” a 30-square-foot kitchen area separated by a partial wall.

“Somebody timed me once,” she says. “I made a pepper steak and collected the money in eight seconds. It was crazy. I’m still fast, but I used to be really fast.”

Help has come slowly at DeFranko’s, partly because of the nature of the tiny operation and partly because Alexander has an admittedly hard time letting go of the place that has meant so much to her. “The details tell the story,” she says. “That to me is the important part of caring, it’s doing it at that level. The customers are my ultimate goal. I really want them to be able to feel like they can come in here, and the money they spend is worth it to them.”

“You know, it’s not about the money,” Alexander continues. “We need the money obviously, but it’s really about what works, what’s good. People relate to food. It’s comfort, it brings people together.”

On a recent weekday, in the span of an hour or so, Alexander makes what seems like dozens of subs for a never-ending line of people spilling out onto the cloudy sidewalk. Two workers in the back cut up vegetables, while another mans the phones for pickup orders. The business’ old mailman says hello between bites, while a neighbor chats amiably next to a first-timer with a big order for a team of guys working a job site nearby.

In the coming years, Alexander hopes to hand off more of the day-to-day duties to her small staff. The time off would allow her to travel and simply to relax, something she’s done very little of over the past 50 years. “I was so shy,” Alexander says of those early days. “I would never have thought I’d own my own business. It just landed in my lap.”

She considers her time inside DeFranko’s to be “a blessing,” even if she’s beginning to look more and more out those large windows, wondering what else there could be on the other side. “I want to play, too,” she says. “I deserve it.”

Alexander declined to publicly disclose the number of sandwiches she makes weekly, but it’s in the many hundreds. That’s a breakneck pace for anyone, compounded by the size and age of the building in which they’re made. Frankly, it’s a surprise that the DeFranko’s building is still standing at this point. The thin walls and easily replicable shape are reminiscent of a certain type of post-World War II pre-fabricated building boom, spurred on by a few notable companies like the Kansas-based Valentine Manufacturing that helped to bring American diners to small towns across the nation in the 1950s. Valentine Diner models could be bought over the phone and delivered directly to a business address at low cost, which single-handedly helped to make the low rooflines, red-and-white paint jobs, and long counters — all now ubiquitous to America’s diner scene — so famous. Because of their inexpensive nature, few of them have stood the test of time.

Years ago, a man came in and told Alexander that he had installed the DeFranko’s prefab building in the 1950s. The place was originally known as Buck’s Cafe, according to public land records, and while many of the accurate details of those years have been lost to history, the man did tell Alexander that he put up the building in June of 1952 — the same year and month that she was born.

“My little shop was being built when I was being born,” Alexander says. “Isn’t that destiny? Isn’t that beautiful?”