The Counter is a weekly column from award-winning restaurant writer and broadcaster Jimi Famurewa. Sign up to get The Counter first, sent to your inbox every Tuesday.
For a while now, I have been slightly obsessed with the dwindling potency of formerly beloved snacks. It is hard to fully explain why. Long before Penguins and Clubs hit national headlines for being reclassified as “chocolate flavour products”, due to their new, cocoa-deficient recipes, I had been wondering why the brightly packaged corner shop favourites of my youth were not exactly hitting in the same way. Did Milkybars always possess that cloying sickliness? Had I completely memory-holed the fact that Jammie Dodgers basically taste like pucks of sugared sawdust? Surreptitious recipe changes in confectionary force us to consider whether it is corporate cost-cutting or our more discerning palates that should shoulder the blame for tarnishing our memories. They force us to ask the question that we all ask at the dissolution of an unhappy long-term relationship. Is it them, or is it us?
This question feels especially relevant when we consider the ever-expanding yuletide bonanza that is Christmas sandwich season. Every winter, London food businesses of all sizes wage war via limited-edition configurations of turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce. Every winter there is an effort to determine which versions are the best. Every winter, otherwise level-headed restaurant enthusiasts get misty-eyed about the crispy onions in the Pret Christmas sandwich. And, well, putting aside the bafflement that greeted my last encounter with a Pret one – a middling, pudding-sweet rush of dry poultry and weirdly prominent leaves of bagged spinach – I can’t help but think that a food genre born from deliciously repurposed festive leftovers has slightly lost the run of itself.
High street chains and supermarkets are slopping gravy mayonnaise on everything, repackaging surplus sausages and bacon as “pigs under blankets” and innovating with wild, rage-baiting abandon (hello Sainsbury’s mince pie and caramel pudding wrap). But they are also, by and large, delivering a level of enjoyment that’s consistent with a circa £5 outlay and a hurried railway concession purchase. Elsewhere, independents seem to have generally embraced a forbiddingly stacked, more-is-more approach. Sprout slaw and global condiments abound. Messy, Tod-friendly dipping pots of gravy are everywhere. And the gargantuan cut-throughs flooding Instagram don’t suggest the mouth of a hungry human so much as the unhinged jaw of a ravenous cane corso.
I’m aware that my Grinchy elder millennial is showing. And I also have a sense that lots of the traditionally Christmassy sandwiches in this year’s crop – behemoths from the ever-reliable likes of Fink’s, Honey & Co and Rogue Sarnies, plus a Mondo Sando bruiser that shrewdly swaps out turkey for crispy-skinned chicken thigh – are carefully crafted exceptions to this broad-brush rule. However, in macro, the modern Christmas sandwich can feel like novelty for novelty's sake; a size and spectacle-obsessed world of cartoon proportions and diminishing returns.
I think this creeping feeling explains a subtle but noticeable shift this year. To my mind, the seasonal sandwich specials that are connecting most seem to have an element of unexpectedness and a uniting principle of formal restraint. Quality Wines’ turkey, Umbrian olive stuffing and sweet and sour radicchio panino brings grudging engagement with the c-word. Fortnum & Mason’s Jeremy Lee-concocted mozzarella, prosciutto and sage leaf toastie gestures towards Venetian elegance (and also carries a £1 donation to homelessness charity StreetSmart), while Chatsworth Bakehouse’s creamed sprout and pecorino milk bun feels truly innovative.
But it is the turkey keema toastie at The George that probably best encapsulates this spirit: two sharply crisped, Breville-adjacent triangles of toasted bread filled with a spurting, riotously spiced payload of outrageously flavoursome Boxing Day curry. It is fierce heat, the glassy, sweet crunch of parmesan and butter-glossed bread, and then a cooling dip in a little sidecar of mint yoghurt. Last week, braving the paper-hatted office party hordes, I had a quiet, lone moment with one, letting my brow bead and all my bah-humbugging festive fatigue melt away.
Maybe this is why Christmas sandwich season still holds such appeal for chefs, owners and diners alike. What feels like competitive excess is about capturing lasting magic. Even in this season of comforting repeated rituals, and amid a flowing torrent of mass-produced sage mayo and cranberry sauce, we are all chasing that moment when familiar flavours are reframed, and something thrillingly new is brought to the tinselled table.
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