Roadchef, M3 at Winchester, and 20 other locations nationwide. Sandwiches £2.50-£4
I don't know how much the dismal motorway service-station operator Roadchef is paying Brian Turner, but I do hope it's a whore's ransom. If he now fancies giving a little of that wedge to me as compensation for having eaten from the range of sandwiches he has recently put his name to, I wouldn't say no.
It's not that these are the worst sandwiches in Britain; it's that they pretend to be something so much better than they are. Brian Turner has won Michelin stars for his cooking. When his face and his name turn up on a pre-packaged sandwich, it should stand for something. It doesn't.
First there's the marketing babble: the laminated menu stuck up on the chill cabinet with Turner's mug all over it and the slogan 'Specially created for you'. As against what, exactly? 'Accidentally created for you'? Or, more correctly, 'Manufactured in some huge factory in the West Midlands by battalions of part-time workers who couldn't give a toss whether you liked it or not'? Then there are the section headings, like 'Light and Tasty', 'Big Treat', 'Mega Bite', 'Premier Choice'. Does Roadchef employ people specifically to torture the English language or does it just happen accidentally?
The products themselves are both banal and outrageously overpriced. Yes, a tuna mayo sandwich can be a classic, but not on limp white bread, and not at £2.99. Nor is that price justified for the uninspiring specimen of bog-standard cheddar in the cheese ploughman's. Both of these come from the 'Big Treat' section of the menu, and if you are the sort of person who would consider them a treat of any size, I would strongly urge you to get out more. My 'Mega Bite' chicken and bacon club was a stodgy mess of cottonwool brown bread, cheap mayo and watery chicken and bacon. Yours for an outrageous £3.79.
Let me attempt a moment's fairness. It is possible that when Turner first tasted these sandwiches, freshly made, they were lovely? The bread still had a certain springiness. The chicken and bacon tasted of themselves rather than each other. The problem is we never get to eat them freshly. That gag about the factory in the West Midlands? It isn't a gag. These sandwiches are produced by the Sandwich Factory Ltd, which makes 650,000 a week from a hangar-sized factory in Warwickshire. They have days of shelf-life and are hyper chilled just to get to you, which completely destroys any flavour or texture.
So, a dismal sandwich at a lousy British motorway service station. No change there then, you might say. Well no, there is a difference. We now have someone to blame. And his name is Brian Turner.
