Pret Cafe, 121 Putney High Street, London SW15 - and everywhere else very soon (020 8788 6695). Meal for two, £10
Not long ago I received a kicking from various readers for daring to suggest that the failure of Sheffield to support a single branch of Pret a Manger for more than three months marked the city out as a gastronomic black hole. Some of the emails argued that the company had, in the Meadowhall Shopping Centre, picked the wrong site, because apparently Sheffield folk don't do sandwiches while they're shopping. The rest of them said that Pret a Manger was a load of old cobblers, that Sheffield makes the best roast-pork sandwiches human history has ever known, and that I was a pompous southern nancy who probably wore women's underwear on the sly. I beg to differ. I haven't worn women's underwear for years.
And Pret a Manger has a lot going for it. I feel the same way about the sandwich chain as I do about the ubiquitous Starbucks-Caffe Nero-Costa Coffee chains. It is cool these days to whinge about the quality of the products sold by these coffee shops, but do you remember how hard it was to get a decent coffee in Britain before Starbucks? Do you?
And as almost all of us have bought our daily latte-mochaccino-demi-espressos from there at one time or other, whining about it is rather hypocritical.
Ditto Pret. The best sandwiches in the world? Possibly not, but the food is consistent, inventive and fresh. I like knowing that I am, at least in central London, only ever a few hundred yards from a more than passable BLT. And a square of pecan pie. And one of those Dime Bar crunch things...
So the arrival of a new £50m Pret concept - the Pret Cafe - is worth noting. Or at least I thought it was. The press release said things like 'lounge-style environment' and 'modern-day dining without the wait'. I took this to mean that Pret was expanding its range out of grazing food into slightly more ambitious stuff. Having visited the first Pret Cafe on London's Putney High Street, all I can say for sure is that they have invested in a lot of leatherette. Oh, and a few dinky teapots. In parts of Britain this would count as a fashion revolution, but not in Putney.
Pret Cafe's USP seems to be the banquettes along the walls and the padded stools, which make a change from the don't-linger-you-dirty-tramp metal stools. And, er, that's it. The menu is pretty much as it has always been, save for the addition of soups, or should I say re-addition, because they used to do soups and then stopped. My Italian sausage and Tuscan bean was gutsy, if more like pea and ham than anything from Tuscany, but good value at £2.40. Other soups to come include porcini mushroom, minestrone and Thai chicken.
There is also a new set of salads sold in very badly designed bucket-like pots. My chicken and bacon 'Caesar' was so deep and so stuffed full of rocket that I couldn't get the meagre amount of dressing into the bottom. Otherwise, it's all BLTs and crayfish sandwiches, croissant and pecan pie: the old Pret we know and love. Plus somewhere nice to sit down in the centre of town.
I suppose even Sheffield could use one of those.
