An English sandwich in New York 

Pret a Manger is a triumph of brand creation. Since its launch in 1986, it has become an integral part of the British high street. And now it's attempting to do the same in America - this week the company opened its 13th New York branch. But can Pret survive in the world capital of 'fast casual' restaurants, where everyone's a sandwich expert? 

Morag McCay and Emma Blackmore are sitting in a windowless room in an office in Midtown, Manhattan. On a table in front of them are 40 or so sandwiches that have been bought that day from nearby food chains and laid out in lines, anchored in place with yellow tape and looking like recovered goods at a police press conference. 

In London, McCay and Blackmore decide the taste of lunch: they are the group marketing director and the international development chef, respectively, of Pret a Manger. Blackmore, who is 30 and easygoing, and McCay, a dry, amused woman in her 40s, had flown in the previous day as part of their company's aggressive (and some say foolhardy) assault on the New York lunch business. 

Since January, Pret a Manger has opened 13 shops in Midtown Manhattan. During their visit, McCay and Blackmore are considering, among other things, possible American deviations from Pret a Manger's British menu - asking themselves questions such as, "Will New Yorkers eat crayfish?" On this particular morning, they are holding a "comparative tasting" to learn more about their competition. With apologies, they reach for what they called their "spit cups". 

The table - with its grid of wraps and subs, its geological layers of rocket leaves and sliced turkey - is a map of what could be called a sandwich war. It illustrates a story of intensifying competition for market share in what the American trade calls "fast-casual" or "adult limited-service" dining; that is, restaurants that offer something more than a hamburger but less than a waiter. In New York, the idea is best represented by Cosi, a sandwich chain known for its flat "artisan" bread, which is baked, theatrically, in open brick ovens at the front of each store. Fast-casual was worth $2.75bn (£1.88bn) in 2001, and is growing more quickly - at an estimated annual rate of between 6% and 8% - than any other sector in the American restaurant market. 

Fast-casual serves those who grew up surrounded by American fast food but whose tastes have come to include roasted red peppers. They have at least momentary thoughts about fat content; they have seen the couch in Central Perk on Friends. 

In recent years, these consumers have begun to force diversification on the fast-food giants, and have inspired the growth of chains such as Cosí and, in the midwest, Panera. And there now seems to be an opportunity to own the five- or six-dollar sandwich the way that Starbucks owns the three-dollar cup of coffee. A company with energy and resources could reach for the great prize - national dominance. "Every neighbourhood in America needs a Cosí," Andy Stenzler, the company's 34-year-old chief executive officer, told me. 

At the tasting, the two Pret women, taking notes, first judge the sandwiches by sight alone, following printed company suggestions ("Defining Pret Food") that encourage giving sandwiches human characteristics. "This one is 'I've got a hangover. I'm falling off the sofa,' " Blackmore says, pointing to a bulge of avocado. She turns to another bright and inviting "gourmet" sandwich: "He's all surface. Quite smart, but there's no depth." After a pause, McCay compares an egg-mayonnaise sandwich to her mother-in-law. Seen beside their bold, abundant American cousins, the Pret sandwiches have a neat, earnest restraint that fall just short of snootiness. 

While the other sandwiches on the table come from made-to-order environments of infinite choice (even if they had not, in fact, been made to order), Pret a Manger's sandwiches are made daily in a kitchen at the back of each shop. Pret a Manger customers take a sandwich from those on the shelves and, against American tradition, may not ask for extra cheese. And, because nobody else is asking for extra cheese, the queue moves quickly. In the American Pret a Manger office, this is called the "time trade-off": control traded for time. 

A few weeks before the tasting, I meet Andrew Rolfe, Pret a Manger's 35-year-old chairman and chief executive officer, a tall and dashing South African. "Before we came, everybody we spoke to who is from New York said, 'Nice concept, but it won't work here,'" he recalls. "They told us, 'Americans want to go to their deli and have their sandwich made their way.' We said, 'We're going to do it our way and see what happens.' " He laughed. "I sometimes think of Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams. 'If you build it they will come.' " 

Recently, I split a pastrami-on-rye sandwich with Andrew F Smith, a scholar of American food who is researching the entry on sandwiches for a Scribner's encyclopaedia of food. We sat at the back of the Carnegie Deli, on Seventh Avenue, among people taking photographs of their inability to finish lunch. (The Carnegie Deli makes the case that the history of New York is bound up with sandwiches tall enough to make people laugh.) Smith ate from a half-pound of pastrami with professional approval but no obvious gusto. 

Smith likes to demolish food-creation myths, but has found nothing to contest the idea that John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, was the first man to think of bread-something-bread, in 1762, during a game of cards. "There had been flatbreads forever," Smith told me. "You might have folded them over something or opened them up, made a pocket. And tortillas. If you consider those to be sandwiches, fine. But I don't. And I've looked in vain to find two pieces of bread around something before this." 

As Smith describes it, in the US and Britain, "sandwich" came to describe both a rough-hewn bar snack and a dainty teatime dish of the kind described in 19th-century cookbooks. The upscale tradition largely died away in the US after the first world war, when the sandwich became established as a working-class standard, its ubiquity linked to the development of artificial preservatives, the recent appearance of commercial mayonnaise and, in 1928, the invention of the bread-slicing machine. 

Sandwich consumption rose during the Depression - "You can put anything in a sandwich and it will fill you up," Smith says - before losing out to the hamburger when meat rationing ended after the second world war; as a proportion of meals eaten, it has never matched its pre-war high. But a child growing up in the 50s, as Smith did, would not have noticed a slump. "In my first 13 years of life, I ate a sandwich five out of seven days," he says. "It was something I could do on my own. If I wanted to pile on the peanut butter, I could pile on the peanut butter and nobody was looking." 

This points to the difficulty that Pret a Manger faces as it tries to take over the fast-casual market in the US; a customer's control over his sandwich is a link to a powerful childhood satisfaction. Everyone is a sandwich expert: there is a marked difference between a New Yorker at the head of a traditional sandwich queue (who has all the time in the world to build his lunch) and that same person one place back, a moment before (who is being driven crazy by people with all the time in the world). "People think, I know the right way to make my sandwich," Rolfe adds. "Well, actually, they don't. We do. That's what we do. We make sandwiches." Pret a Manger makes them hygienically, with great precision, and with reference to instructions on a laminated card with colour photographs. "1) Lay out the granary bread on the bench. 2) Mix the chicken and the Thai green dressing in a bowl. 3) Using a 16 scoop, portion chicken mix out evenly. 4) Spread to all edges using two forks." 

Pret a Manger was founded in 1986 as an urban concept and, as the company grew in the 1990s, it began to exhaust the number of British cities large enough to support it. It also expanded beyond the managerial capabilities of its founders, Sinclair Beecham and Julian Metcalfe. In 1998, they took a step back and asked Rolfe, who had worked for PepsiCo and run Kentucky Fried Chicken in Britain, to join them as a partner and CEO. "It was a wonderful brand, but the business was chaotic," Rolfe says now. As he brought order - new training manuals and IT systems - to the company, the possibility of international growth seemed increasingly attractive. Rolfe knew America, he was married to an American and he had watched Manhattan office workers consider joining a deli-sandwich queue, look at their watches, and walk on. In 1999, he asked Beecham to set up the first Pret a Manger shop in New York. 

Beecham arrived in New York that autumn. He had no leverage in the city's monolithic and inflexible food-distribution system. One distributor, hearing of Beecham's plans for expansion, simply cried, "An English sandwich shop!" and could not stop laughing. 

Beecham recruited Monica Gelinas, a clever, idealistic woman from Rutherford, New Jersey, who was 22, and had just graduated from Cornell University's hotel school. He made her his effective partner in the build-up to the company's launch in New York. "I became a food talent scout," Gelinas says, recalling long trips to farms and food warehouses. "All I could think about were ingredients. I wouldn't be able to sleep. I had nightmares about trying to find watercress." 

As the opening of the first American shop, on Broad Street, in the financial district, approached, Gelinas and Beecham found that they disagreed about what an American sandwich was, and what a New York Pret a Manger could be. Beecham had wanted to reproduce the London store. Gelinas pressed for New York customisation: bagels and self-service coffee, for example, neither of which was available in London. "It was, 'Come on, you're being too British. You need a condiment station,'" Gelinas told me. When the shop opened, in July, 2000, she had won those arguments, and space that in London would have gone to stools and tables had been given to a coffee station and lemon wedges. 

The shop was not an immediate success. "It was way too big," Rolfe says. "And the food wasn't right." (Americans, it turned out, like a "drier eat" than the British - less mayonnaise.) But it had been intended as much as a pitch to potential investors as anything else, an argument that Pret a Manger had an international future. And in January last year, Rolfe announced that McDonald's - which is now moving into what it calls other "meal occasions"- had bought a 33% stake in the company, adding Pret to a portfolio that includes Donatos Pizza and the burrito chain Chipotle. McDonald's has an option to buy the company outright in 2005. 

McDonald's is confident that Pret a Manger can grow into a major international brand, and Rolfe plans 200 stores in Manhattan alone. The Pret a Manger model is also being tested this year in Hong Kong or Japan. But the case for the pre-packaged sandwich has not yet been won in America. Briazz, a sandwich chain founded in 1996 by a Seattle-based businessman named Victor Alhadeff and closely modelled on Pret a Manger, has lost more than $40m (£27.3m). Pret a Manger is a curious brand for America - fresh but pre-packaged, "natural" but industrial, a little short on the fillings - and, in dissenting from that country's culinary creed of abundance and transparency, it is either brilliantly post-fast-casual or else has missed the point. "God bless them, I hope they do great," Stenzler, of Cosí, said. "But I think it'll be very challenging for them." 

A few weeks ago, a new Pret a Manger opened on Lexington Avenue at 54th Street. At the end of the day, after the shop was closed, 10 or so young employees, waited for a "graduation ceremony" with the smiling resignation of teenagers about to see their parents dance in public. Staff arrived from Pret a Manger's head office - English and American accents equally balanced - and Tunde Williams, a Pret a Manger "team leader," sprang out of the kitchen wearing fabric wings and a wedding veil. Dividing the room into men and women, he ran a blind-date contest that ended with a shy young man being mock-handcuffed to Pret a Manger's recruitment manager. The new employees - still learning about Pret a Manger's alien corporate style, which Britain knows to be a kind of ironic peppiness - gave each other sidelong looks. Speeches were made, then people began to drink cans of Budweiser, and eventually someone removed the plastic handcuffs. 

A longer version of this article first appeared in the New Yorker. 

The Guardian Friday August 9, 2002