Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Pret A Manger (again)

From left: Sausage Hot Pot, Mango and Passionfruit Smoothie, Roast Beef, and Christmas Lunch

In spite of all the fuss that I kicked up yesterday about the wheat bread that these guys use, somehow the thought of this place's sandwiches was still stuck in my head today, so I headed back over for a quick bite.

This time I tried a couple other sandwiches, including the Christmas Lunch that they so proudly boasted about, as well as the Roast Beef sandwich. The first one was pretty much what I expected, although there was one surprise again: the presence of fried shallots inside, which gave it a nice touch without providing too much dragon breath. By this time, I was expecting all of their sandwiches to have some surprising ingredient inside (like the pine nuts yesterday and the aforementioned fried shallots), so I was actually rather disappointed to find that the Roast Beef sandwich was the most basic and traditional of them all. Actually, this in the end turned out to be very welcome, with just a simple horseradish spread and straightforward meat...nothing chi-chi about this. Good.

Since the two half sandwiches were still a bit small, I made sure to get a bowl of soup today too. The Sausage Hot Pot sounded the most interesting out of today's three selections, so I grabbed that. But it was a bummer, as the sausage was neither the spicy nor greasy kind that I would have wanted.

Well, to those that share my concerns about wheat bread and the small sized sandwiches, I did notice that they had some bigger ones on baguette that could easily address both of those issues. Unfortunately I did not notice those until after I had started eating.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

ha.. you're cute!

Sam said...

As an ex-Londoner who found the 2-half sandwiches rather large for my smaller appetite I love the sound of these half Pret sandwiches.

My favourite as i recall was one with crayfish and rocket.

I was also addicted to their chocolate brownies.

This was all, of course, before I moved to America, land of the chocolate brownie and no pret a Manger, at least not on the West Coast. I heard they have them in NYC?

I am going to forward this post to an English friend who has just moved to Singapore...

Anonymous said...

This opening was something that I was actually anticipating, so it was with baited breath that I popped in yesterday for lunch. I found their sandwiches.....suck. I got the Roast Beef, now I'm not going to say that every restaurant has to try and reinvent the wheel when preparing food, but come on! My Mom had greater bouts of creativity in sandwich composition when she was fixing my bag lunches in 3rd grade. One of these days I will forever swear that I'll not order another sandwich in Singapore. This turd had one slice of Roast Beef in it, I pulled it out and it couldn't have weighed more than 20 grams. The bread was abysmal (it tasted like Gardenia Wheat), and the cashier couldn't even be understood. I have a hard time imagining that this kind of crap would fly in either London or New York, HK I can understand because people there are used to boring, crappy food.

bma said...

Dude, that's harsh, man. There's some good food in HK.

Anonymous said...

well said,the last commement was spot on!!!
i can not beleive you went to Pret again !!!
call yourself a foodie, can you not taste that the food is not fresh ?
don't you know that they don't make the food there?
why do you think they hide behind a big wall
don't you know that nothing is cooked there?
man you've been blinded by all the glitz and glammer , find some real food look and you will find.....