Dining Out 035: Paul Rothe and Son

Lunch in Marylebone.

Don’t know if anyone’s noticed but it’s absolutely freezing out. This means that it is of course Soup and a Sandwich szn, which itself in turn meant that last weekend marked time for a trip to Paul Rothe and Son.

If you’re not familiar, this place is a soup-and-sandwich pilgrimage spot; a little deli on Marylebone Lane that has been in the same family since 1900, starting as a shop selling imported German foods. Over the ensuing century it has evolved into the Paul Rothe and Son that we know now: a fine purveyor of an extremely British type of sandwich in the caff-slash-deli style, with a few tables for sitting in, its walls lined with every possible type of jam you could desire, because Paul Rothe likes selling jam (relatedly, I enjoyed this interview with the man himself; good if you are interested in knowing his thoughts on Pret).

As you walk in, the counter brims with chunky fillings like egg mayo with dill and coronation chicken. These get piled up high between slabs of bread that are less doorstop and more doorstep, and spill out merrily around the sides, like me leaving the pub at any time during the month of December. The sandwiches here are made to order, and lovingly cut into four triangles for you, should you be dining in.

I think this place’s reputation as the home of London’s most classic sandwiches is interesting in the context of the city’s current Sandwich Invasion. Big Sandwich culture is everywhere: Mondo just opened their café-bar in south east, Dom’s Subs continue their Hackney-based dominance with a soon-to-be-launched hamburger stand in London Fields, and there was even recently an article in the Guardian about massive sandwiches, which is funny. Now I will take a Cool Big Sandwich any day of the week – I love salami, sue me – but it’s nice to visit a place like Paul Rothe and Son as a reminder that a) London caff culture has been home to extremely satisfying bread-based lunches before hot honey, “dad hats” and Instagram were but twinkles in an eye, and b) classics made with love, care and experience are pretty hard to beat.

My friend Elise and I headed down to the deli last Saturday. It was an absolutely miserable day, the air heavy with pissy drizzle, making it kind of an ideal moment to duck inside for a warm, cheap, hearty meal (I spent £16 all in). We stuck our heads in at 1:30PM, and though there was no queue outside, as is customary at lunchtime on a weekday, there were a lot of people waiting for seats.

As such, we squeezed in next to an older Canadian lady called Teresa, who gladly welcomed us, and told us that she’s a regular and lives locally (Stephen, the “and Son” referred to by the name of the place, explained to us as we were leaving that she can be found gassing with his dad most days). As we slipped into our seats and introduced ourselves, we also managed to order some food. My choices were very simple – I went for a decaf Americano (POV: you are 30), vegetable broth, and from the seemingly limitless sandwich selection, I picked egg mayo with anchovies, listed on a helpful “favourites” board at the counter for idiots like me who get stumped by any type of decision.

The soup arrived with us quickly, steaming when it was placed down on the table, to match the shop’s slightly fogged up windows. It was a broth in the proper sense: semi-translucent liquid swimming with soft veggies, like carrots, celery, lentils and a little potato. It tasted good for me, and nostalgic, too. It was a soup made not with bells and whistles and gut health and cramming in your vitamins and Ninja blenders in mind, but one that had clearly cooked in a big pot over a toasty stove for a long time, and really just wanted to warm you up. And as Elise and I hunched over our hot little bowls of this stuff, we got acquainted with our dining companion.

Teresa spoke quietly and her lilting tone of voice reminded me of the cadence of an actress in a golden era movie. She was wearing red lipstick and slowly eating a prawn and crab sandwich on granary bread, with the crusts cut off (her review: “It’s very good”). Over the course of our meal, she told us about her daughter (a dermatologist in Chicago), her late husband (eight years her senior; they met when she was working as a Christmas temp at a department store in Montreal), her favourite places in Paris (she lived there for a decade), and the fact that she once encountered Al Pacino in New York (her review: “Very short”).

At some point during her extremely compelling telling of all this, by the way, my sandwich came. It was great. The mayonnaise was made tangier by dill, the egg white cut in straight, thin, uniform strips to give it proper bite and texture. I’d happily add anchovy to pretty much anything, but here it offered oiliness and depth – though the really showstopping part of proceedings was the bread.

It takes something quite substantial to contain egg mayo, which by nature is desperate to escape the confines of any sandwich that dares to try and contain it. These big slices of thick, straightforward brown bread, however, were more than up to the task – perfectly springy, though the crusts gave them heft, demanding you tear them hard with your teeth. Again, it’s not a sub roll or a heritage grain sourdough, but you absolutely would never want it to be, for this, a Big Sandwich in the truly classic style; a reminder that you can innovate all you like, but there’ll always be a place for tradition.

Anyway, between the superlative sandwich and hearing about the finer points of Ralph Lauren’s Paris restaurant, where you are invited to eat the designer’s own cows from Colorado, this was a pretty sensational lunch on a rainy day. Another of those occasions when the food, the surroundings and the company come together to form something greater than the parts of each. It’s the casual, generous nature of the offering at Paul Rothe and Son – the welcoming way that there’s almost definitely something that literally every single person would like to eat there – that sets the tone for the rest of it. I think Teresa probably put it best when we first met, as we shuffled past other diners to sit down next to her. When we thanked her for the seats, she smiled at us. “This,” she said, “is the type of place where you share tables.”

I paid for this visit.

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Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. Weekly reviews are free to read every Thursday, and you can follow us on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 a month or £50 a year, to get extra content every second Sunday.

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