My favourite category of London food and drink experience is “things that feel like scams but aren’t”. I’m walking on air when I stroll out of Christie’s in St James’s with a free flat white in my hand (barista coffees are gratis if you stick your head around the door of one of the exhibitions). The day St John Bakery popped up on Too Good To Go was one of the happiest of my life. And I derive a near-narcotic thrill from availing myself of one particular central-London lunch deal.
I swore never to write about it, lest the spell be broken. What changed? Pret a Manger launching a new range of salads, that’s what – one of which, the Miso Salmon, is yours for the frankly outrageous sum of £12.95. There’s a time and a place for a Pret (6am in Gatwick South Terminal, specifically), but if you’re going to drop double figures on an office lunch, you’d rather it didn’t go to a faceless multinational, wouldn’t you? You’d feel better about spending your money somewhere interesting and independent. Like Fortnum & Mason.
I will already have lost some of you at this point. I get it: the idea of trotting off to Fortnums in search of a bargain will never not be, at best, slightly ridiculous. But if you’re still with me, follow me through the doors of this 318-year-old institution. There are bargains to be had here on the music-box-like ground floor (bounteous bags of yellow-stickered chocolate truffles; the cakes get the same treatment most afternoons), but not at lunchtime.
Down we go, into the heavenly subterranean food hall, past the wines and the cheeses and the best-in-show vegetables, all the way to the back. There are long queues for the filled-to-order bagels and fresh pasta; ignore them both. Between them you will find your Ithaca: the salad bar.
There are some excellent ready-boxed options, starting at £8.50 (£4 less than Pret! And they don’t just taste of celery salt!). But we’re going to go for the pick-your-own selection: your choice of two salads and a protein in a lidded bowl so capacious you could wear it as a hat, all for £10. Properly filled – which it always is – this contains around half a kilo of food (yes, I took one home and weighed it).
If you eat meat, go for the bavette steak, perfectly blush-pink in a punchy chimichurri marinade. It’s exactly the same meat that’s on the counter behind you, sourced from some of Britain’s best farmers and cooked by chefs just next door. And there is a lot of it. Ditto the succulent trout fillet and the griddled chicken: easily four times as much protein as you’d get down the road at Farmer J, which has queues out of the door all day long.
Time for salads: vermicelli noodles with tofu puffs and bird’s eye chilli, or roasted root vegetables in a more-ish peanut dressing. Or crunchy kale and apple slaw, or griddled sugar snap peas and new potatoes. There are between six and 10 to choose from and the selection changes most months, so you won’t get bored. And for what it’s worth, the people on the salad bar team are also some of the nicest in London: chatting to them never fails to brighten a workday.
Nothing good lasts forever, and I worry that by blabbing about the lunch deal I’m hastening its demise; someone will realise what an unbelievable steal it is and, quite reasonably, decide to jack the price up. If this happens and you, like me, are wedded to never breaking a tenner for a desk lunch, I feel duty-bound to tell you this isn’t the only bargain-boujie deal in the area: cross the road to Paxton & Whitfield, where a fancy drink, a bag of posh crisps and (as long as you get there bang on midday, because they sell out) an absolutely enormous sandwich filled with the shop’s wares will set you back exactly £10. Great news – unless you happen to be the Pret next door.
I Can’t Stop Thinking About is a series about dishes Broadsheet editors and contributors are obsessed with.
