The upmarket retailer M&S has released a new strawberries and cream sando just in time for Wimbledon.
Retailing from £2.80, the sandwich is inspired by Japanese sandos found in convenience stores across Japan, a food style that’s becoming increasingly popular in modern Britain.
For the real deal in London, head to Happy Sky Bakery in Hammersmith. In the meantime, the Standard’s restaurant critic David Ellis and food writer Josh Barrie share their lunchtime thoughts on M&S’ attempt. We were not sent the sandwich.
Josh’s take
Waitrose is better than M&S. Waitrose is a culinary pantheon, a sophisticated supermarket filled with such delights as Ottolenghi hummus and Moldovan sparkling wine. M&S mostly trades in posh ready meals and what might be characterised as picnic essentials, many of which miss the mark.
It’s been a long and pernicious assault on culinary convenience: during one panicked stopover at the Moorgate branch, I saw “Chicken Caesar salad sushi” and another product called the “Everything but the burger salad”. It was enough to make me consider going back to Iceland in search of Kerry Katona’s old party range.
But credit where credit’s due: M&S’ new strawberries and cream sando is a fine piece of work. Make no mistake, while inspired by Japanese sandos, it’s far from “authentic” — a word people enjoy when discussing matters of taste these days — but it’s well engineered and, here’s the all-important point, it tastes good.
Here the otherwise unwell development team has performed with elan: first, the strawberries are British — it’s a good year for British strawberries, particularly ones from Kent — and are sweet, juicy and Captain Scarlett red. Possibly there’s been some meddling with how they grow. The layer of cream, meanwhile, is thick and luscious; the bread has been sweetened to resemble brioche, a bread I loathe with savoury foods like burgers or pate but which, for me, works well with fruit and dairy.
To produce a sandwich of such guile at enormous scale requires a degree of alchemy. A rare win for M&S.
David’s take
Someone in the Marks and Spencer food development process is going through something. Divorce? Drink problem? Potentially fatal knock on the head?
In recent times Marks and Spencer — purveyor of sensible underwear, jumpers for your uncle, wine you can take to parties — has willing sold chicken katsu sandwiches (vile) and shredded Brussels sprouts in Marmite butter (ditto).
Progress, perhaps? At the very least experimentation. And, truth be told, it’s pleasing to see them move beyond the drab confines of a ham and cheese sarnie. The global influence that has made London’s dining scene the best in the world has now filtered into our country’s supermarket. This is how we arrived at the limited edition strawberry and creme sandwich. Yours for £2.90 (at least in London; elsewhere it may be the advertised £2.80). You might notice, too, that it looks rather different in person to the publicity pictures.
As British as Blighty gets? Not quite. In Japan, fruit sandos have long been a thing, going back until at least the 1920s — partly, I suspect, as they look so good, in that neat and orderly sort of way. There, the fruit and cream is placed between two slices of bread, either very ordinary white sliced, but often also shokupan, the sweet Japanese milk bread. Both are usually crustless.
The M&S take is not crustless, and the bread is of the sweetened kind — it is similar, really, to brioche. The strawberries are Red Diamonds (a trade name), which are grown to be particularly sweet. It is smothered in cream cheese. You can see where I’m going with this: all too sweet, in the end. But the idea is sound, and I didn't dislike it.
What was missing, of course, was a bitingly acidic glass of Champagne to level it out. That would have done the trick. Pour me a glass, read me Keats and take me rowing — then I’ll be eating these by the caseload. In the office? It only made me long for Japan.
