SILVERDALE — The sandwich in front of Robert Pierson — nearly a foot long and filled with meatballs, peppers and cheese — would be more at home in a deli on the East coast.
“It’s fantastic,” Pierson, a paramedic at Station 51 in Silverdale, said as he took a bite. “It floods the senses. It’s really, really good.”
Pierson and the rest of the B shift crew at Central Kitsap Fire and Rescue's Station 51 are the latest Kitsap firefighters to experience John Duefrane’s culinary chops.
For the past two years, Duefrane — aka “Meatball John" or "Johnny Meatball" — has been making his way to each fire station in Kitsap, serving up his meatball subs to the firefighters.
Since 2014, Duefrane has served every shift and every station in South Kitsap, Bremerton and now Central Kitsap. He has plans to travel to Pierce County stations once he finishes here.
“It’s really nice, we really appreciate it,” said Tony Giove, an apparatus operator at Station 51.
Duefrane, who lives in Port Orchard, spent 22 years as a firefighter in Milford, Connecticut. He moved to Washington after his sons got out of the military in 2005. Before that, he experimented with meatball sandwiches in Montana in the '80s and '90s.
The idea for the station-by-station tour came after a bad accident in Port Orchard that prompted a large-scale response from South Kitsap Fire and Rescue. Knowing that some of those firefighters would be on scene for hours and probably hadn’t eaten, Duefrane drove out to feed them.
It quickly became apparent that it would be easier to visit the stations. And once he started cooking, word spread. Soon, Duefrane was getting requests to make his subs at other stations.
"It's just giving back to what I done, what I love to do," Duefrane said.
As for the subs, he said, there aren’t any tricks. He doesn’t use any fancy ingredients.
Hamburger is rolled into meatballs and cooked in sauce for three days, before being loaded into foot-long boats of bread and topped with steamed peppers and melted cheese.
The result is a massive sandwich — or grinder, in East Coast parlance — that is difficult to finish in a single sitting ... or even two. Duefrane warns firefighters not to try their luck, in case they get called out to a fire mid-dinner.
"They all think, 'I'm a big eater, I can eat that,'" Duefrane laughed.
He said he's made close to 400 sandwiches, and only 35 firefighters have finished one in a single sitting.
“These are not Subway sandwiches,” he said.
While cooking, Duefrane has only two rules. One: Stay out of the kitchen. And two: When he arrives, there must be a fresh pot of coffee (he'll drink four to six cups, depending on how long he's cooking).
"If I run out of coffee, you'll never see me," Duefrane said. "No coffee when I arrive, I'll go home.”
For the firefighters, the meal is a change from the norm. Usually, crews take turns cooking for each other. While they do try to eat healthy, sometimes, "We have some pretty extravagant meals," Giove said.
The only thing Duefrane lets them help with is hauling in the equipment. After that, he’s in charge of cooking and cleanup. Once he’s done and everyone has eaten, he leaves.
“It’s really cool,” said Elliot Bresnan, another of the station’s paramedics and one of the few that had already tasted the subs.
“He doesn’t take any money or help, I think he just really likes to be around the firehouse.”
Duefrane insists that what he's doing is nothing special. The station-by-station journey gives him something to do, he said, but it’s also a way of communicating his respect to the men and women on the job.
"It's just something I like to do," he said. "Giving back to what I loved and took care of me."
