Bread winners

In the style stakes, sandwich giant Pret A Manger has gone dry and curly at the edges. But can a makeover, asks Christian Broughton, help it win back its slice of this lucrative market?

It's a rainy afternoon in Putney, and in the busy new Pret Café people are in no hurry to head back out into the cold. There are the hip kids by the door, tucking into sandwiches and soup while chatting about their band's new website. There's the older guy with the grey beard, newspaper and carrot cake. And, this being London's Nappy Valley, there are two mums, with prams, chatting over cappuccinos. As for me, I've just sat down on with one of the new white crab and crayfish sandwiches (very nice too) and, looking around, it's clear that Julian Metcalfe, Pret's creative director, is on to something.

For the past five years Metcalfe has had little to do with the company he co-founded in 1986 - he's been busy setting up Itsu, his new chain of sushi bars in London's Chelsea, Soho and Canary Wharf. Now he's back, and Putney's Pret Café is the first taste of what's to come. Gone are the high stools, the dark reds and almost all that brash stainless steel. Now it's all chocolate brown, tan and orange. Dark wood is everywhere and down one side runs a leather banquette scattered with suede cushions. There's even some seriously chic Florence Broadhurst wallpaper. Just the sort of place to linger on a wet and windy day.

"In five or six years, we'll have 200 Pret Cafés in the UK," says Jane Botros, the buoyant spokesperson who's dealing with press enquiries in the absence of Metcalfe himself (despite his reputation as a workaholic, he's just taken two weeks off). There are currently 122 Prets in Britain, and though they'll all get some kind of makeover (Metcalfe recently described the old look as "like the inside of a washing machine"), not all will become Pret Cafés. "Where there are lots of offices, in the City and Canary Wharf, we'll stick with the take-away model. So we're converting some Prets, and opening new ones - it'll cost £50m." That's a lot of bread, you might quip. But by early February, just a month after opening, takings were up by 45 per cent in the Putney branch, and that's before the Cafés new line of savoury pastries arrives. Give people a nice room to eat in, and they're more likely to stick around to buy vegetable chips, carrot cakes and granola-topped yoghurts.

For Metcalfe & Co (that includes McDonald's, which bought a third of the business in 2001), good news is welcome. Openings in New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo went badly, helping to rack up a £20m loss in 2002. But, for now, Pret has still got 121 of the old-style stainless-steel washing machines, where high stools were perfect for a 1980s crowd who wouldn't dream of wasting precious time lowering bum to banquette. Pret is playing catch-up.

"We've been in and out of the phase when people wanted to rush in and out," says David Collins, the Dublin-born designer who created the look for Eat, one of Pret's rivals. "People now want to get good food and get out of the office for half an hour." That's the premise Eat founders Niall and Faith MacArthur brought to the high street in 1996. Working with Collins was a smart move. He knows about café culture - he set the look for both Café Rouge and Dôme. He also knows our aspirations - Locanda Locatelli, Mirabelle, Cecconi's and, most recently, the Wolseley have all been decked out in the Collins brand of modern deluxe. From the start, Eat had the kind of soft lighting and muted tones Metcalfe has just discovered.

Now Collins is "evolving" the Eat design, sticking to the brief MacArthur tells me is "to create a warm kitchen; white walls, white tiles, no clutter". Most recently, dark wood was ditched in favour of blond. There are currently 26 Eats in London, and one in the Bullring, Birmingham. Three more will be added each month from March until June, then one a month for the next year. That's 50 by the end of June 2005. To squeeze Pret's ambitions even more, Marks & Spencer (each week 240,000 loaves and 34 tonnes of mayo go into its sandwiches) now has sit-down sandwich stations, called Café Revive, in most stores, and has recently introduced seating in the Canary Wharf branch.

Slurping the last of my Pret latté, I pass Starbucks where just a couple of people sit and the fittings look cheap and corporate, picked by neither a cutting-edge designer nor a Passionate About Everything entrepreneur; the scruffy, purple-velvet battered armchairs are a million miles from the Seattle coffee shops that inspired it. At lunch-time in Eat on Lower Regent Street, I couldn't get a seat, and there are about 60. I walked to the old-style Pret on Haymarket. Twenty of the 30 or so stools were free. So whether Eat, Pret Café or even M&S will come to rule our lunch-times, it seems plenty of us are ready to leave our desks, pull up a comfy chair and have a bite of luxury for lunch. We know which side our bread's buttered.

Use your loaf

* Sandwiches are named after John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, an inveterate gambler who acquired the habit of sending for cold meat between sliced bread so he wouldn't have to bother leaving the gambling table to eat.

* Although the name is relatively recent, the concept itself is ancient. The first recorded sandwich was made by Rabbi Hillel back in 1st century BC when he pressed a paste of nuts, apples and spices between two matzohs.

* UK consumers buy about 2.2 billion sandwiches, worth £3.5bn every year. The sandwich market is nearly five times bigger than the fish and chip market.

* According to the British Sandwich Association the most popular sandwich filling is chicken, followed in descending order by cheese, ham, tuna, bacon, egg, prawn and then a myriad of others.

* Marks & Spencer used to hold the record for making the largest pre-packed sandwich until William Reed Exhibitions, in conjunction with Unilever Bestfood, created a gigantic tuna number weighing 1,595,50kg last year.

Hannah Southall

The taste of things

We asked a panel of "Sunday Review" readers to test five high-street sandwiches. Here, Nick Phillips, 23; Lisa Patterson, 26; Julian Fiddes, 30, and Margaret Gugan, 52, give their expert opinions

Benjys

Founded by the Benjamin family in Islington, 1989

Branches 65 nationwide

Motto "Less bread"

Low fat ham and cheese, £1.75 Julian: "Generous, but tastes cheap" Club, £1.75 Lisa: "Not as moist as Pret's" Breakfast, £1.50 Nick: "Nasty cheap sausage"

Overall: 5/10

Eat

Founded by ex-banker Niall MacArthur and his wife Faith in 1996

Branches 26 in London, one in Birmingham

Motto "The real food company"

Egg mayo & cress, £1.30 Lisa: "I often go for egg mayo, but this isn't quite as nice as Pret's" Ham and Jarlsberg, £2.70 Lisa: "It's actual, real ham - the nicest I've ever had in a sandwich" Club £3 Margaret: "Would be better toasted"

Overall: 8/10

Marks & Spencer Café Revive

Founded as stand-alone food stores in 2001

Branches 49 nationwide

Motto "Quality, innovation and trust"

Chicken and stuffing, £1.70 Nick: "Good stuffing, and it's filled right up to the edge" Prawn & mayonnaise, £1.50 Lisa: "Just prawns and mayo, it really needs something with it" Chicken Caesar, £2.10 Lisa: "The Parmesan's really strong, but you can't taste anything else"

Overall: 7/10

Pret A Manger

Founded by college friends Julian Metcalfe and Sinclair Beecham with a £17,000 loan in 1986

Branches 122 in Britain, 13 in Tokyo, 10 in New York and six in Hong Kong

Motto "Passionate about food"

All-day breakfast, £2.60 Julian: "There's no more you could possibly fit in, and it's not greasy" Big BLT, £2.20 Lisa: "Prefer the all-day breakfast" Crayfish and rocket, £2.75 Margaret: "More flavour than a prawn mayo. I'll hang on to this one"

Overall: 9/10

Starbucks

Founded in Seattle by writer Gordon Bowker, history teacher Zev Siegl and English teacher Gerald Baldwin in 1971

Branches 7,613 worldwide

Motto None

Club, £2.95 Nick: "There are three bits of chicken in this half, near the middle so it looks good" Chicken pesto, £2.65 Lisa: "Have they wafted a jar of pesto near it? I can't see it or taste it" Mozzarella tricolore, £2.95 Lisa: "It's slimy, I'd really be upset if I'd spent £3 on that"

Overall: 4/10

The second Pret Café opens in Milton Keynes this spring. British Sandwich Week runs from 9 to 15 May. Readers can nominate their favourite sandwich shop by e-mailing admin@sandwich.org.uk or by calling 01291 628 103