You may not hear ‘a nightingale sing in Berkeley Square’ these days, but walk just a few yards from it up Hay Hill and you will find the most superb sandwich shop.
But it’s not an ordinary sandwich shop. Oh no. This shop sells Roman sandwiches, sandwiches made from the freshest of fresh Roman bread (Spianata®) filled with delicious and unusual fillings.
Typically Spianata® bread is baked flat, a mere 30cm wide but about two metres long. It is prepared from proper fresh bread ingredients every morning. The art in making this special dough is in the kneading and folding, prodding and rolling, to get it the right texture for stone-baking. It is incredibly light, airy and crisp with a lovely golden crust. In Rome it’s known as pizza bianca romana.
It was about 11am and in need of a coffee I found myself in Spianata&co®
It looked nice – clean, fresh and welcoming with its checker-board style little tables, white walls with some red and green stripes (very Italian flag). On the shelves an array of neatly boxed sandwiches, then a refrigerated unit stocked with salads, cold drinks, fruit and desserts. Along another wall a service area and a machine producing wonderful Illy coffee. Above the service area the day’s specials were listed because Spianata® also has a limited selection of hot meals along with soups of the day.
I was slightly perturbed because whilst there was a good selection of sandwiches it didn’t look like enough for the lunchtime rush. ‘If you have time sit and watch’ I was told by a young man who brought me my coffee and who turned out to be the owner of Spianata®, Stefano Nicolai. Not long after a trolley laden with crates was pushed through the door. As if from nowhere a number of assistants appeared and within five minutes the shelves were full of sandwiches.
Stefano stopped long enough to tell me more about this rather unusual sandwich shop.
He had arrived in London as a teenager with his parents who had work here. When they returned to Rome he decided to stay on and finish his studies – a degree in Mechanical Engineering, which he topped up with a Masters from the London School of Economics, which in turn led him to work with an international city bank.
However, he had been brought up to appreciate and love good food and missed the Roman style cooking of his youth. He particularly disliked the over-chilled sandwiches made usually from indifferent bread with boring fillings and soggy from too much mayonnaise that he bought for his lunch. So an idea began to develop and he returned to Rome to learn how to bake bread. He returned with specially designed work surfaces and an oven and opened his first bakery close to St Pauls in 2004. More City of London shops followed and the original bakery relocated to larger premises at Holborn Viaduct, from which all the shops are supplied daily.
The bread is baked until mid-morning so the room-temperature sandwiches (displayed on special cold-lit shelves) made as soon as the bread has cooled are as fresh as they can be – delivered continuously first for breakfast and later for lunch. The fillings are freshly sliced cured meats, sun-blush tomatoes, artichoke hearts and regional cheeses starting from £3.45: a fabulous sounding Speck, Pear and Gorgonzola sandwich for £4.55, the average price is £3.95.
By now the girls were putting bowls of neatly cubed end cuts from the fresh bread onto the tables which they provide free of charge with complimentary oil to be enjoyed with the hand-made soup and pasta dishes or whilst people are waiting for the sandwiches to be warmed up.
This year the British Sandwich Industry awarded Sapianat&co® the only Platinum award for Best Independent Sandwich Bar of the Year and last year its bread received Gold in the Great Taste Awards. A Foody Traveller certainly considered it to be Simply the Best. A.H.
For lists of shops and more information visit www.spianata.com