From shiso mayo to a Mexican black garlic mole, the menu at Liverpool’s Belzan is littered with the hip east Asian, Latin American and Nordic influences that make foodies’ eyes glitter. Yet one of the restaurant’s most popular new dishes is a sandwich. A sandwich made with Warburtons’ toastie loaf that, somehow, still costs £12.
Supermarket white sliced apart, this creation of buttermilk-fried rabbit patties, lardo mayonnaise, bacon-and-coffee jam and fermented cabbage is no ordinary butty. Instead, chef Sam Grainger’s “McRabbit” riffs on the Japanese katsu sando, a soft, crustless white bread sandwich typically filled with unusual breaded fried meat and various sweet, hot or pickled condiments, that has, via New York and London, become a burgeoning cult dish.
From the $180 (£140) version that high-end Manhattan sandwich bar Don Wagyu serves in a bespoke wooden box to, in London, Tōu’s £14 panko-crumbed iberico pork sando, the precise, rectilinear sando is plated in sections, cut-end-up for maximum visual impact. “It has blown up on Instagram,” Grainger says. “It’s the new poké bowl or halloumi fries.”
Grainger regards such hype with a wry eye, but loves how the sando makes us question how we perceive the oft-neglected sandwich, and how such populist dishes help connect nerdy chefs with a new audience. “Restaurants are becoming more accessible to those who may not venture out to eat calves’ brains, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like a sandwich. Because it has lots of different elements, the sando is probably the only sandwich you couldn’t pull out of the bag at home, and chefs are really pushing on quality.”
Alan Yau, the founder of Wagamama, is another sando supporter. Together with the Italian-restaurant chain Obicà, he is about to open Mozzasando in west London, an Italian-Japanese hybrid that will serve Milanese-style breaded chicken or veal cutlets in sandos housed in more specially designed presentation boxes (average price £7.50).
Yet the sando is just one strand of a surging interest in next-level sandwiches. Beyond Two Lights’ sardine or Ichibun’s celeriac sando, the sandwich – so often thrown together at home or wolfed down from Tesco Metro to fill a hole – is suddenly the subject of much love, care and attention from ardent foodies. As Restaurant Magazine’s editor, Stefan Chomka, puts it: “Premium sarnies are very much in vogue.” The grilled cheese sandwich, for instance, has emerged from its trashy street food years as an impressive, affordable staple at specialist craft beer and wine bars and at high-quality kiosk-cafes. Try Birmingham’s Kilder, Liverpool’s Wild Loaf or Leeds’s Owt. With good sourdough and cheese, says Grainger, “it’s something you can do quite easily and which people love”.
At the same time, a new generation of sandwich cafes – from London’s Sons + Daughters, Bodega Rita’s, Sub Cult and Dusty Knuckle, to Edinburgh’s Bross Bagels – are applying restaurant-standard cooking to the Subway/Pret model. Sub Cult’s signature Sub-Marine, for instance, is a half-bagel, half-brioche sub filled with slow-cooked pork, marinated calamari, crackling and torched hand-dived scallops, finished with salsa verde mayo.
At Max’s Sandwich Shop in north London, Max Halley is pushing the focaccia sandwich as the perfect way to deliver a multitude of flavours and textures simultaneously. Max’s has successfully repositioned sandwiches such as its Ham, Egg ’N’ Chips (ham hock, fried egg, piccalilli, shoestring potatoes, malt vinegar mayo) as complete dishes that people will happily eat as evening meals.
Sons + Daughters co-owner James Ramsden has similar ambitions. “A sandwich for dinner has traditionally felt like a depressing cop-out, which is nonsensical because you’d happily have a burger. We’re trying to remove that psychological barrier,” he says. His sandwiches are priced at about £9 for, say, roast Swaledale chicken with soy-cured parmesan, pickled cucumber, gem lettuce, miso mayo, green sauce and wasabi cress. “We want people to feel properly fed, not ripped off. Take the bread away and they work as dishes in themselves.”
Against the background of other food trends, however, this sandwich renaissance seems remarkable. Low-carb diets are all the rage. Mintel reports that 12% of households include someone who eats a gluten-free diet. Sales of white sliced bread fell 12% from 2012 to 2017, and, in late 2018, Warburtons described the market as “very challenging”. Britain’s ready-made sandwich market is huge: 57% of all food-to-go sales and worth £5.6bn annually, say analysts Kantar, but volume sales have been falling. Rewind 12 months and no one was talking about sandwiches as a hot product.
Paradoxically, that may be precisely why gourmet sandwich bars are emerging and why sandwiches are appearing on menus in top-end restaurants (Sabor’s chicken oyster bocadillo, say). We are eating sandwiches less frequently, but when we do, we want the best. Likewise, in retail, the premium sandwich market is still growing. In 2019, M&S, whose share of the grocery sandwich market is higher than ever at 21.2%, launched its “best ever” prawn cocktail sandwich. In week one, says a spokesperson: “It rocketed to be the best-selling sandwich line in our whole portfolio.”
Gradually, the sandwich is becoming a treat. Hence Leeds restaurant Home recently including a truffled mushroom velouté “toastie” on its tasting menu (“It’s got the genes of a sandwich but it’s completely different when you taste it”), and why it serves a grilled cheese sandwich at its new spin-off pub, the Owl. “I’m not a massive sandwich fan,” says the chef and co-owner Liz Cottam. “Everyone’s paranoid about carbs and if you’re talking malted loaf with boring chicken salad fillings, I’d prefer not to eat, personally. So if you’re doing it, do it right. And done right, warm sandwiches are amazing.”
For Ramsden, the rise of sandwich-led cafe-restaurants reflects broader socioeconomic currents. “In these hellish times, we need familiar, comforting food. I think that’s why pasta has had a similar renaissance in the likes of Pastaio and Padella. The sandwich fits that trend. It’s a treat, but for £10 not £50. That’s where we’re at as a country.”
“Comfort food will never go,” says Yau, who texts screenshots of the Mozzasando WhatsApp group brainstorming concepts such as “the dichotomy of taste” and its aim to develop a “post-Escoffier” cooking methodology using an “architectural metrics product concept”. Yau is making sandwiches but he is sweating every millimetre in each rigorously engineered recipe.
“I could pile the whole thing up in a traditional American burger-bun way,” Yau says. “But what’s appealing for me is the construction, the architecture of toasted 30mm milk bread, a 20mm deep-fried Milanese and, at a molecular level, driving the taste dynamics in a 3mm sauce.”
Asking people to pay almost £10 for a sandwich is not without challenges, Ramsden concedes. “Show the sandwich contents arranged prettily as a salad and people wouldn’t blink. But add bread and: ‘It’s ridiculous money for a sandwich!’ We’re used to paying £4, max.”
But he is confident this superior sandwich trend will stick. “It’s like denim, isn’t it? Everyone gets the sandwich because it is so simple. That makes it fun for us. It’s a blank canvas.”
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