27 August 2025

What’s up with London’s sandwich bros?

Layer up the sliced meats and the corporate bohemians of the West End will come.

On Fitzrovia’s Charlotte Street sits Italia Uno, a sandwich shop and record contender for most Italian flags per square metre anywhere this side of Naples. The sign looks like it hasn’t seen a sponge in years; the awning rusts. The interior is two parts building site to one part Lazio changing room. It is operated solely, or so it seems, by an industrious old man and his lugubrious male sidekick. The menu is scribbled on a blackboard. And the queue is winding out the door.

Make salami sandwiches in a shop resembling a shack and the corporate bohemians of the West End will come. But what do they want? Sandwiches, yes – the ur-lunch of the professional class. But I detect a deeper yearning among my fellow queuers, with their single earrings and ambiguous job titles (“senior creative”? Please…). They want slow service and for their food to come in paper bags; they want to counter-signal their aesthete status with unfashionable artichokes; mostly they want to recoup something long lost to them, if only they knew what it was.

If the Marxist theory of false consciousness contends that the proletariat are so consumed by capitalism that they cannot even see their chains, then the Italia Uno-goer thinks much the same. But instead, it is the tyranny of Pret a Manger obscuring the clear thinking of the working luncher. Pret, with all its attendant and slovenly freedoms – namely, to eat cold slurry in spongy cold bread without having to wait for it – is imprisoning the attendees of the urban office. Its homogeneous menu and ubiquity (from one vantage point in Trafalgar Square you can see three at once without so much as needing to turn your head) is crushing its soul.

So to Italia Uno, where the toaster-singed bread had a kind of bullying effect on the rest of my mortadella sandwich. I liked it, nonetheless. And sure, what the hell! Maybe I did feel my chains slipping, my fondness for Pret tuna slop waning and my dislike for its identikit interiors hardening. Don’t just take it from me, but from all those senior creatives who lined up for their Tuesday lunch, too. The spiritual draw of Italia Uno might be greater than the culinary one, but the sandwich still proved itself against my 20-minute wait. The pigeon that settled down to peck at the sizeable chunk I dropped on Goodge Street seemed to like it too.

I am not the only one bravely pinballing around the city to eat sandwiches in shabby places. In January I was in Edgware, at the northernmost end of the Northern Line. It was freezing, I was miserable. We were sitting in the Royal Sandwich Bar – a kind of Indian caff on the Station Road – sharing a paneer toastie because a food blog told my credulous friend it would be worth the trip. It was, actually. But more interesting to me is the project addling the brains of London’s food bros, as they march across the city with a strange mix of intrepidity and indifference in search of this most banal of lunches.

Their Mecca is Scotti’s Snack Bar in Clerkenwell – a tiny caff that opened in 1967. There is a menu, I think, not that anyone showed it to me. The crisps were Walker’s basic and the sausages seemed more processed than usual. The waitress spoke in a Cockney lilt. I was there for the chicken escalope ciabatta. Breaded chicken in bread? Brilliant, whoever thought of that. The Silk Road never quite made it here. The cosmopolitan 1990s happened somewhere else too. As for the small-plates revolution of the 2010s? Don’t be daft. This is small-c eating.

I returned to the office, soporific, in a bready haze, with old London coursing through my veins and sitting heavily in my stomach. I was thinking of my fellow travellers in the queue outside Italia Uno, the Fitzrovia pigeon that couldn’t believe its luck, and the patient friends on the Tube to Edgware – all in search of lunch that private equity hasn’t touched. This is the reactionary lurch of the office worker, a nostalgia drive, the promise of enlightenment between two slices of bread at the end of the Northern Line. In fact, I can’t help but wonder that this isn’t really about sandwiches at all.

[See also: The millennial parent trap]