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Louise Thomas
Editor
Pret, the once-reliable sanctuary of harried office workers needing midday sustenance, now feels like a parody of itself. Soggy sandwiches with price tags that have you wondering if there’s a gold leaf tucked between the slices. A compulsory “dine in” surcharge that reeks of nickel-and-dime tactics.
The subscription, a revolutionary lifeline during the pandemic, now seems like a bad joke. They lured us in with five “free” coffees a day for £25 a month, only to slap us with a 20 per cent price hike. Now, they’ve slashed it to £10 a month in exchange for 50 per cent off those same uninspiring brews, which, if you maximise the benefits, makes each drink 10 times more expensive under the new model. No thanks. You’d be better off going for the filter coffee, which they’ve just dropped to 99p.
Like most brands, its ubiquity, once its strength, has become its downfall. So omnipresent was it in the capital that the joke was one could hurl a cheese and pickle baguette out of one outlet, and it would land on the doorstep of another.
Well, now it might land on a competitor’s doorstep.
“Our targeting for new locations is to find the nearest Pret and open up across the road,” says Josh Kleiner, who’s 24, excitable and the son of Nick, who, along with his wife and two sons, has just opened Sandwich Sandwich on Gresham Street, near St Paul’s. There are about eight Prets in the vicinity, though you’ll need a strong arm to throw one of Nick and Josh’s sandwiches to land on their doorstep. They can weigh up to a kilo.
They’re of the “doorstop” variety and have become a cult favourite in Bristol, where the first Sandwich Sandwich opened in 2012, next to Nick’s fine dining restaurant Juniper, which he sold in 2015. Now there are five across the city, and one in London (partly funded by the £100k they pocketed when they were named Uber Eats Restaurant of the Year 2023). “He took his expertise in restaurant-quality food and put it between bread, which you can’t get anywhere else,” claims Josh. Their “posh ham and cheese”, with pulled ham hock, grated mature cheddar, garlic and parmesan soft cheese, fresh parsley and homemade piccalilli – all locally sourced from independent and family-run suppliers – certainly gives Pret a run for its money.
Which raises an interesting point. In the past year, Pret has been accused of rampant profiteering following hikes across its 450 stores in the UK, with the company defending its costing decisions simply with: “It’s a really tough market.” Which, it sort of is, but things reached a head when the lunchtime juggernaut went viral for whacking a heart-stopping £7.15 “dine in” price tag on its cheese baguette. The backlash was swift and fierce.
If punters aren’t prepared to pay for that, why would they pay for Sandwich Sandwich’s £7.95 Posh Ham and Cheese? “The sandwich sizes, I’m sure you are aware, are not on the small side,” says Josh in that self-assured way that makes me wonder if he’s practised this answer in front of the mirror. “If anyone in the City can finish one of our sandwiches, I’d be very impressed. But also, everything is traceable. Everything’s locally sourced. We take so much pride in the ingredients we use.
There is absolutely no rhyme or reason as to why we couldn’t be bigger than Pret one day
“If you put a Pret sandwich next to our sandwich, you would laugh, I think.” One scroll of their Instagram confirms you’re at least getting more bang for your bucks. I couldn’t hold one of their sandwiches in one hand.
While Josh’s confidence seems boundless (“There is absolutely no rhyme or reason as to why we couldn’t be bigger than Pret one day”), he hits the nail on the head as to why this just might – might – work. “While Pret has filled a very important convenience gap, we believe that lunchtimes in general have gotten boring. People are now eating for convenience, rather than pleasure and fun and excitement.”
Sandwich Sandwich is “bringing something to London that is both convenient (they have a grab-and-go range as well as dine-in options), but also to excite people again”. Their plan is ambitious: another City location by year’s end, and a further four or five across London next year. They’re even considering a nationwide expansion. It echoes Pret’s own growth trajectory back in 1986, but with a crucial difference: a relentless commitment to quality. They’re hands-on, family-run and dedicated, a stark contrast to Pret’s faceless corporate machine.
They’ve even moved to London to make it possible. “Purely because we care so much about this business. We are so family-run that we could not be one of those businesses that would open up somewhere and externally try to run it. I’ll be making sandwiches, I assure you,” says Josh. Though presumably they can’t be in two, five or more places at once.
If their soft launch last week is anything to go by, there’s still an appetite for quality expensive sandwiches that Pret no longer satisfies. “We were doing some trial runs, and we must have turned away around 250 people in the space of about 10 minutes,” says Josh. “The police were called. They got in touch with us to say, ‘You guys need to put measures in place because we know how busy it’s going to be.’”
They’re expecting to be churning out thousands of made-fresh sandwiches a day. For just this first site, they’ve hired 65 people, with 38 working at any one time. For context, Pret employs around 18 people per site. “It’s so scary but so exciting,” says Josh, who doesn’t seem fazed by these numbers at all. It’s what they set out to do, after all. “We’re expecting queues of hundreds of people every single day. It’s going to be impossible to fulfil the demand. But our plan has always been to set London on fire.”
It strikes me as a bit of a David and Goliath scenario. Only this time, David wields a doorstop sandwich that could double as a free weight stuffed with local, artisanal ingredients. Josh and his family’s dedication to quality, their almost comically oversized offerings and their bold expansion plans could all signal a refreshing change in a market that’s grown stale. Whether this brave venture will ignite (quite literally, according to them) the lunchtime scrum or fizzle out under pressure remains to be seen.
One thing is certain: in a landscape dominated by convenience, there’s a new contender in town. With a bit of luck and a lot of ham hock, Sandwich Sandwich might just rekindle our love for lunch – one colossal bite at a time.
