The Five best club sandwiches in the world

Suvretta House, St Moritz, Switzerland
Villa d’Este, Lake Como, Italy
Le Sirenuse, Positano, Italy
The Beverly Hills Hotel, Los Angeles, USA
Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, Cap d’Antibes, France

Last month, Gail’s unveiled a new ‘smoked chicken caesar club sandwich’ on its menu — a huge moment for fans of both ‘private equity-backed upmarket convenience food chains’ and ‘sandwiches with very little structural integrity’, in whose venn diagram I sit precisely in the middle. (I write this now with mayonnaise on my quarter-zip.) The preppiest food item on the planet has now gone mainstream, it seems — which got me hankering after some of the best club sandwiches I’ve enjoyed over the years, in much the same way that surgeons cauterising open wounds find they are suddenly yearning for bacon.

The club sandwich, while we’re on the subject, is a curious and too-unexamined thing — something that must have been invented by “the enemies of America”, according to Anthony Bourdain in a 2016 essay. Bourdain acknowledges that the combination of ingredients by itself is excellent. But the club “goes wrong,” he continues, “with that third slice of bread”. This triplicated toast is purely for aesthetics, he writes: it helps the club stand high and handsome on a barroom plate, its erect toothpick as triumphantly American as that flag they put on the moon. (Let’s not get into all that now). But the effect is an inedible, overengineered slip-n-slide of a thing that is prone, in architectural terms, to catastrophic failure. (Two condoms, similarly, are much worse than one.) Naturally, then, the very best club sandwiches are the ones that cunningly counteract this central design flaw — sometimes with extra thin bread in the centre, sometimes with an admirable restraint in filling, and always with chips on the side.

1. Suvretta House, St Moritz, Switzerland

I was once sent to St Moritz for four nights specifically to photograph and review the club sandwich at Suvretta for a magazine story that never ran — which might, franc for franc, make it the costliest snack ever pushed through as a tax-deductible expense. (And my thanks again to the gentleman in the Suvretta lobby for his astute fiscal advice.) A lot of part-timers will make the case for the rival club sandwiches down at Kulm or Badrutt’s. These are good, but perhaps a fraction slipperier than the one up on the hill. The Suvretta offering is wonderfully structurally sound for such a wholesome combination: proper, thick, pan-fried chicken breast, a decent egg, good toast. And yet, unlike so much at this altitude (marriages; second marriages), it stays the course.

2. Villa d’Este, Lake Como, Italy

Villa d’Este spotted Lake Como and said ‘let’s put a pool in it’. Anywhere with that sort of insouciance is bound to make a good club sandwich, a snack which thrives on such joyous redundancies (see: that third slice of bread.) The offering here is made with decent ciabatta and excellent ingredients. You are advised not to swim after consuming it — but it is sometimes good, one finds, to keep lifeguards this handsome on their toes.

3. Le Sirenuse, Positano, Italy

The purists over at the Union Club in NYC (which claims to have invented the club sandwich) would have a heart-attack when they saw Le Sirenuse’s bold interpretation — which, ironically, is designed precisely to minimise the risk of heart attacks. Here, underneath the gorgeous overripe terracotta walls of this singular hotel, the usual heavy mayonnaise is replaced with fresh guacamole — a substitution which works far better than it should. The bacon has likewise been swapped for a more wafery pancetta, which is nice, while the tomatoes actually have some flavour, which is even nicer. Chef Gennaro uses pomodori di Sorrento from just over the headland — the same variety Le Sirenuse uses in its caprese salads. Most interestingly, perhaps, Gennaro insists on toasting the bread in a sandwich maker, not a toaster — achieving a charred golden outer but a softer, effectively-steamed inner.

4. The Beverly Hills Hotel, Los Angeles, USA

Long the mainstay of night-shift chauffeurs or buoyantly hungover William Morris agents, the Fountain Coffee Bar at the Beverly Hills Hotel is suffused with that characteristic West Hollywood perkiness, a sense of sudden and endless possibilities. (Indeed, Martin Kuczmardski tells me that his excellent Dover Street Counter was partially inspired by its sweeping bar.) The Club Sandwich here is pretty good, which is all it needs to be. The “smart, sharp, but ultimately sensitive new limited series” that the waiter has just pitched to you ought to do the rest.

5. Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, Cap d’Antibes, France

“I will say right from the outset that the dinners I threw at the Hôtel du Cap over the years—and I held a number of them—were evenings of such pleasure and exuberance and glamour that, had I not been the host, I would most certainly never have been invited,” begins Graydon Carter in his introduction to a book celebrating the hotel’s 150th birthday. Such delicious impostor syndrome is often the norm at the definitive Riviera hotel, which still vibrates with a frisson that began with F Scott Fitzgerald and ends somewhere near the tip of that rock slung, baby blue diving board. Order the club sandwich and imagine you’re supposed to be there.

Previous Issue

Issue 1

The Five Actually Poshest Pubs in London

With little consultation and even less self awareness, The Times attempted to define London’s poshest pubs. This is a corrective list, affectionate, sceptical, and better informed.

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