Honest to god, the sun makes everything better doesn’t it? At the time of writing this I am still technically “between flats” but also: it was 15 degrees on Saturday and I got to go and get a coffee without wearing a jacket so how bad can anything be really?
I always find that in the sun, even simple things seem thrilling. Like, on Sunday, I went to the pub – something I do often, actually, because I am class – and I took a sip of Aperol while standing in a small, bright patch of warm, and felt the sensation of shoulders uncurling and my entire body properly relaxing for the first time in weeks. I had my first Being A Bitch Who Is Slurping An Iced Coffee walk, and carried myself like Nicole Richie heaving around a Starbucks bigger than her head in 2004. I listened to the new Tubs album in Brockwell Park and enjoyed it even more than I might have otherwise, because I was wearing sunglasses. And, most importantly for our purposes here: I ate a ham, butter and cornichon sandwich, merrily ripping baguette with my teeth as I walked to a nail appointment, and it was probably my favourite meal of the week (and this was a week during which I also ate a Falafel and Shawarma, so I’m really saying something here).
After a big few days of bars and restaurants over the previous weekend*, this one just gone was a bit more low-key, though on Saturday afternoon, you could have called me Winnie the Pooh the way I felt my tumbly rumbly. Luckily, I was very close by to the small Redchurch Street branch of Jolene, the Queen Bee of hypey London bakeries (locations: Shoreditch, London Fields, Newington Green, and Hornsey Road), where I knew I’d be able to procure a good looking sandwich, so procure I did.
Despite its mini size – a maximum of four customers are allowed inside at any one moment, and when they reach capacity they operate a one in one out policy, like you are at a club in uni only there’s loads of sourdough everywhere – Jolene Redchurch St. as a place very much reflects the wider Jolene brand in general.
It’s bright and airy, like Gwyneth Paltrow has just farted in there. On a counter to your left as you go in sit an array of very trendy cakes and pastries, made with en vogue ingredients like Greek yoghurt and Guinness** and rhubarb, laid out so beautifully, with such neat handwritten labels, that if you told me they were sculptures I’d believe you. And at the front of this counter, there is a choice of three sandwiches.
This particular Saturday, I had my pick of an egg mayo situation, something with Reuben-adjacent fillings, or, as fortune would have it, my favourite sandwich combo of all: ham, cornichons and butter, otherwise known as Jambon Beurre. As a horrific ditherer, I usually struggle to choose something like a sandwich flavour in anything less than five-to-seven minutes, but as soon as I saw this one, I was of course sold.
I like Jambon Beurre firstly because: if you are a meat-eater, why would you not enjoy salty, fatty ham paired with sharp pickles and absolutely loads of butter on fresh bread? But secondly, I like it because it’s classic and reliable, like sticky toffee pudding or cheese and tomato pizza. I see it all over the place right now – obviously the Pret one is a classic of the packet sandwich genre, but I also spotted a JB in M&S Food in Waterloo the other day – and while I am pro-Big Sandwich, it’s nice that something more pared back is getting to bask in a bit of glory too.
As soon as I got out of the shop, I started in the direction of the nail salon. As I went, I tore the sandwich’s brown paper wrapping open like a pigeon trying to get at a discarded tray of chips, and admired what I found inside. It had been made with baguette-style bread, some Spanish jamón, spears of chopped cornichon, and lashings of butter. As the age old adage goes: “Hell yeah brother”.
The ham’s smokiness was coaxed out by the eye-squinting zing of the pickles (though if there had been a few more of those in there, I’d not have complained). The layer of butter was so generous that at one point, a lot of it kind of globbed together – the way sandwich fillings do when you squeeze them between crusty bread to get the whole thing in your mouth – resulting in one particularly decadent bite, which of course, I immortalised for you:
It was great, it was easy, and crucially, it was only about £1.50 more than you’d spend on something crapper in a chain coffee shop. The sun was kind of like the fifth ingredient, another simple addition to lift both the sandwich and me up even more, as I bounced around Shoreditch chomping away. The experience put me in mind of the kinds of places where you might snack on that jamón outside a bar or during a tapas hour. It was a bright moment during a bright weekend, and I needed that.
* And, by the way, if you’d like to read the thing I was researching the night I went to Café Mondo, you can do so here via the kind people at British Vogue.
** Guinness seems to be “out” for drinking (I went to a pub the other day which ONLY had Murphy’s on tap) but it’s very much “in” for cakes. I just call them how I see them, I don’t make the rules pal.
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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Lovely, also Lucy going absolutely HAM (pun not intended) on the illustration, perfect synthesis
The best sandwich xx