The 50 Best Sandwiches in London
The Best Thing Since...by Ed Fenwick, Jonathan Nunn, Kelly Pochyba, and Isaac Rangaswami and Adam Coghlan
This guide is part of Give Us This Day: A Vittles London Bakery Project. To read the rest of the essays and features in this project, please click here.
Look out for pieces on a 113-year-old East End institution, the myriad purposes of sliced white bread, a potted sandwich timeline, the history of London’s Caribbean bakeries and the definitive London bakery guide next week!
The 50 Best Sandwiches in London
50 sandwiches you will like, in six categories. By Ed Fenwick, Jonathan Nunn, Kelly Pochyba, Isaac Rangaswami, and Adam Coghlan. Illustration Alex Brenchley. Photography by Michaël Protin.
Eating sandwiches in London, by Ed Fenwick
Getting a sandwich is the quickest way to experience London without ceremony. When you go to a restaurant you eat with others who’ve made a similar decision, but when you eat a sandwich in a park or on a wall, London happens around you while you eat. You so often experience a sandwich in a designated window of time and London gives you places to enjoy them – a cemetery or a park to sit in, a pub to have a pint in, or a walk you can take it on. Anyone who goes to the same place for work every day has their lunch spot; go to any London park or bench and you can see how most of the capital eats its lunch.
The sandwiches in this guide are, therefore, as much a map of places where you can watch London happen as they are an historic geography of the city’s immigration patterns and what its residents want to eat. We’ve tried to reflect at least some of the huge variety of what London offers inside two pieces of bread: North African, Turkish or Caribbean sandwiches in north and east, Portuguese in south west, Brazilian or Indian in north west, Italian everywhere, or the old East End diaspora in Essex edgelands. There truly aren’t many international sandwiches you can’t find within the M25 (although if anyone knows where to get a Tunisian fricassee please lmk, I just can’t find one). I’d like to preface these selections with the thought that sandwiches aren’t meant to be life-changing meals; they’re meant to accompany life once a day. You could call them everyday sandwiches.
Sandwich morphologies
Long – baguettes, bánhs, somun ekmek, challah rolls and subs
Round – rolls, baps challah and coco
Soft – focaccia, ciabatta and other good things that happen to be Italian
Flat - pita, flatbread and khobz
Sliced – triangles, rectangles and other shapes of most-often-white slices
Toasted – toasties, paninis and grills
All entries by Ed Fenwick unless states otherwise.
To find a map of all 50 sandwiches (and more) mentioned in this guide, please scroll to the end of the article.
Long – baguettes, bánhs, somun ekmek and subs
North African baguettes on Blackstock Road
This is kind of a small category in itself as I don’t know which one of Cafe Salaam or Mediterranean is my favourite. Certain sandwiches are better at each.
Café Salaam and Mediterranean Café both offer four sandwiches. Merguez, meatball, chicken or liver baguette. My favourite at Salaam is the smashed-up meatball. The chef chops the meat while it’s on the grill, mixing it like a New York chopped cheese, cracking an egg through it and adding chips, parsley and salt at the end. Harissa and mayonnaise are spread inside each side of the toasted baguette before the meat, chip and egg mix is placed inside. I think this is pretty close to a perfect sandwich.
I like the liver sandwich best at Mediterranean (though I also recommend the merguez baguette here made using the sausages from the deli Al Baraka just opposite, with aniseed sprinkled over the sausages as they fry.) There’s no egg fried through it but the owner Lour (who used to run Salaam) has his own trick: he scoops out the inside bread from the baguette to make space for more filling, leaving the crust to act as a case. You get a very healthy portion of liver on top of the chips, which are squished into the bottom on top of the usual mayonnaise and harissa mix. I think the chips here might be the best prepared of the two. The last time I was in, I asked for my sandwich to be chopped in half. Then the chef asked me to hold one end to steady it for cutting, which made me unreasonably happy.
26 Rock St, N4 2DW
49 Blackstock Rd, N4 2JF
Kokorec at Fındık İbo’nun Yeri
I was recently speaking to the manager of The Midyeci in Dalston about kokorec and how it was very hard to find in London, due to regulations relating to cleaning the lamb’s stomach and intestine lining that it’s wrapped in. He then recommended this place up by the M25 in Enfield as his favourite sandwich in the city. Kokorec is offal – sweetbreads, hearts, lung – wrapped in lamb intestines and then slow roasted on a rotisserie. It comes off looking not dissimilar to porchetta or a cigar unravelling its tobacco leaves. It’s then cut off, put on the grill and chopped up with tomato, green and red peppers, oregano, chilli and cumin. It’s fatty, rich, herby and not as offal-ly in flavour as you might expect due to the seasoning (though the texture is very much that of offal, pleasingly.) The correct bread to use for kokorec is somun ekmek, which here is made by a baker friend especially for them. Bouncy and crusty, it’s perfect for what goes between. I was incredibly happy when, sitting on a tiny chair underneath an umbrella right next to the food trailer, I opened a metal dish in the centre of the low table to reveal pickled peppers in their brine. As much as it’s a fantastic sandwich it’s also just a lovely place to sit, where eating a sandwich is only half the joy.
820 Hertford Rd, Enfield EN3 6UE
Fish kokorich at The Midyeci
This is The Midyeci’s own creation apparently – not a stomach lining and intestine kokorec sandwich of the type you would get in Istanbul, but a ‘fish kokorich, made entirely from scratch on the grill in front of you. A fillet of mackerel is put on the grill skin side down along with a mini somun ekmek, a sub-like roll that local Dalston legends (and friends of The Midyeci) Akdeniz Bakery make especially for them (a commissioned bread roll is a very good sign that the details are being thought about.) The chef then adds fresh tomatoes and peppers to the grill and fries everything until brown, adding spices before chopping up the mackerel and mixing everything until it turns into a rich, dark sea of browns, reds and greens. The top of the roll is then dipped in oregano which makes the first bite the best. Squeeze lemon on each bite and add those evil little chilli peppers as you want. You can make it a meal deal with ten stuffed mussels and a Sarikiz.
505 Kingsland Rd, E8 4AU
Bánh mì phố cổ at Lò Bánh Mì
The Old Quarter banh mi at Lo’s in Borough – an offshoot of the Vietnamese restaurant Rao Deli next door – is a paragon of sandwich construction, one that should be printed in textbooks for every young sandwich maker to learn from and follow. The individually-sized baguette, about the length and shape of a cacao pod, is toasted gently so it’s not too crusty but warms the garlicky liver pâté to melting point. The ham and char siu provide two separate textures, the mayo and char siu sauce some lubrication and sweetness, with jolts of pickle and chilli heat to balance it out. The sandwich is small but generously filled, built in striated layers, with the baguette holding everything firmly in place. I ate this at the start of what was supposed to be a sandwich crawl and broke my own rule one by finishing it all and going home – I couldn’t bear to waste a single mouthful. It is the last sandwich I ate for this guide, and my only regret is that I haven’t spent more time with it. JN
Note: you can get a vegan version of this sandwich with tofu curry.
Unit 1, 304 Borough High St, SE1 1JJ