Year of Eating Differently (122): Soho Snax, Brewer Street

Godawful.
Some kind of tricolore focaccia, served up by a guy who was almost too shy to speak, wrapped up in paper like a piece of battered cod, and then I made the mistake of adding a geriatric blueberry muffin to my order. If I've said the Pret Christmas muffin was a ball of hot disappointment dressed up as mucus, wrapped in a doughy exterior, then I'm sorry; this was far far worse. Not in a long time have I had to throw something away because I couldn't face taking another bite of it.

Year of Eating Differently (115): Neal's Corner Sandwich Shop, Shaftesbury Avenue

So, in a bit of a hurry today, and it's grey and wet outside, so a quick visit here was all I required. This is probably one of the best small sandwich shops that I've been to in recent weeks; bread for my tricolore panino tasted much fresher, and the avocado actually had a bit of flavour to it too (unlike say the chilled-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life-and-never-quite-revived stuff you get at Pret, for example). Service is admirably quick, and they have a pretty good selection of gooey chocolate cake.

Year of Eating Differently (113): Julia's Meadow, Newman Street

Well, it was this or Spud-u-like in the Plaza, and my companion was unimpressed by that idea, so we ended up here instead, sat down at a table and drinking ginger beer like civilised people.

Service was a bit slow because there was a constant stream of people coming in for takeaway and being prioritised over us, so if you were in a rush this wouldn't be much good. Then again, if you were in a rush for take out, you'd probably be in a huff that the smug people hunkered down over a table were getting their stuff first.
Had a panino; the usual triumvirate of green, white and red. Wasn't bad, wasn't anything special.

Year of Eating Differently (107): Double J's, Charlotte Street

They've got a 'License to Fill', apparently. There was an absolute din from the workmen over the street demolishing a building, and it's freezing cold, so I feel something akin to shell-shock at the moment. Have a toasted ciabatta with mozzarella and sundried tomatoes to make up for it. And some crisps. Hardly unique, eh?

What may mark this out as something special is how many staff there are. There were four customers in the shop including me, and about six people in bright orange t-shirts with 'D-J' printed on them - since I can only assume that Double J is already an abbreviation, it seems a bit much to contract it further.
Normally, the ciabatta will be mozzarella and sundried tomatoes and something else. Not so today, and as a result it's certainly lacking something. Lacking excitement, joy, surprise, or at least some basil leaves. So in future, please remember that a sandwich is best if it has 3 fillings. Not less, not more. So perhaps that lack of anything special is something special about Double J's.

Year of Eating Differently (100): Carlton's Coffee House, Broadwick Street

Possibly the worst panino I've eaten in living memory. Mainly because they don't have a panini toaster (or possibly to save time, although the more I think about the logistics of this, the more confused I become), they have one of those conveyor belt heating devices that in a normal cafe would be used to heat slices of toast. Thus the bread isn't forced together and fused with the innards in the way that you usually get with a panino; it's more like a sliced baguette with some warmed over sundried tomatoes and mozzarella inside. Not impressed. But the place was heaving with people - then again, it is a Friday lunchtime. Hey ho.

Year of Eating Differently (97): Servito, Broadwick Street

Despite the poor chap here being assailed by the sound of an alarm going off every five minutes, he seems quite happy, trapped behind his counter with a coffee machine behind him and bowls of sundried tomatoes and olives to the fore.
Shop itself is tiny, and on the table has two bits of advertising: a programme for the Curzon and a flyer for Torture Garden's Valentine Special, which I can't remember the link to.
Anyway, flagellating Goths aside, the place is pretty good - prompt service (well, it is off the main drag of Wardour/Dean Street) so I'm the only customer in there and he's very cheerful - perhaps because he's changed the display on the till so that it reads 'YOU ARE BEING SERVED BY AN ITALIAN GUY' when he rings up the bill.
Sandwich is focaccia with sundried tomatoes, rocket and mozzarella. This is very good, and comparatively cheap compared to some meals recently, but a word to the wise: sundried tomatoes and tomato foccacia might be over-egging the pudding very slightly. Crumpled by defeat, off to sleep under my desk while the database gnashes its teeth over some minor infraction of referential integrity. Or does it? Or do I? [enquiry into midweek ennui, doubts over own existence and exactly what it is databases do at night whilst you slumber omitted for the sake of brevity]

Year of Eating Differently (95): Benjy's, New Oxford Street

Benjy's used to be a chain of cheap sandwich joints that spectacularly self-destructed in 2007. Prior to then, they used to serve pretty awful sandwiches and other items of food, that were sometimes handed out to the homeless if they weren't sold by the end of the day. A cruel man might suggest that it would have been unsurprising if they'd been told by the homeless to keep the sandwiches - if that was all they could afford, they needed them more than the average tramp did.
So I was a little surprised to light upon a Benjy's still trading on New Oxford Street. Nothing was branded as Benjy's food - I had a quite foul plastic wrapped mozzarella roll from 'The Food Company', a name that betrays the same imaginativeness that was applied to their recipes - and the Eccles cake and packet of crisps were also standard fare. One does wonder if the location had just been taken over by somebody else, too lazy to dispense with the Benjy's logo.
If you feel some nostalgia for a very cheap sandwich shop from the turn of the century, pop along. Otherwise, I can't see much reason for it.

Year of Eating Differently (83): Caffe V, Rathbone Place

Free soup with every filled sandwich. I thought there was a catch, but there wasn't. I needed a sandwich, and I got soup as well. Happy days.
Sandwich - well, it was focaccia with mozzarella and sundried tomatoes, plus some rocket. So pretty much the same as the Tricolore from Make Mine, but not dripping with so much oil that you could feel the early onset of a heart attack.
Soup was courgette and vegetable. If I didn't know better, I'd say that a courgette was a vegetable, but ours is not to reason why, ours is to do and dine. It's very good soup. The last soup I had was probably some of that godawful Covent Garden stuff (half soup, half salt, all man!) whereas this tastes like, well, soup. Could have done with a bit of salt though.
Also got a muffin - toffee apple yoghurt - that will contribute to the muffin directory, and a packet of crisps, for only 5.35. Jolly good.

Year of Eating Differently (77): Cafe Dolce, Wardour Street

Another 45 minutes lost in the post office trying to mail a bicycle part to Germany. And thence down Wardour Street to Cafe Dolce, tucked away on Wardour Street behind St Anne's Court.
On the downside, service is a bit rushed because it's packed here at lunchtime, and the selection of sandwiches was limited to one panino. If I'd had time to stay, there was a huge variety of pastas, sausage and mash and so on that would outclass Malletti (particularly now that the pizza captain / project manager / overseer at Malletti has gone off to have a baby and their QA has dropped).
On the upside - they do what looks like a monumentally good roast chicken sandwich, the guy serving me looked like a white haired hitman and the waitress in charge of building sandwiches and operating toasters had three stars tattooed on the inside of her right wrist - what does all that mean?

Year of Eating Differently (72): Cafe Bruno, Wardour Street

Interesting ambience here. It's diagonally opposite Vita Ingredient, which looks like a macrobiotic whorehouse, all healthy juices and smoothies and stuff on a plate which is probably incredibly worthy but doesn't taste of anything at all. Cafe Bruno, on the other hand, enjoys the kind of decor that you'd have in the 1970s (wood veneer panelling), most of the customers look like vagrants and if they don't, they look even more suspicious - what man goes around with two Nokia phones? Particularly the same model - is he saving one for spares?

Anyway, I'd just depositted 37 quid in spare change at Natwest, and, feeling flush with cash, threw down 2.50 on a focaccia with mozzarella and plenty of pesto. Couldn't wait to get out of the place because I was worried one of the tramps was going to either eat me or demand money for meths, but in fact everyone in there was quite quiet and minding their own business. The focaccia was fine too - although not very much there, possibly after gorging myself at Christmas it was time to reduce the dietary intake a little...

Year of Eating Differently (45): Silva's Grill and Sandwich Bar, Shaftesbury Avenue

Cold clear day, so what better than to wander down New Oxford Street, pick up some photos from Jessops and then wander south to the warm environs of Silva's? Had a tri colore pannino - very good, although afterwards I still felt hungry enough to go and buy some rubbish from Starbucks to go on top.

It's a bit crowded inside, but you can sit down at one of the bench seats, and then steak and chips somebody was having for lunch looked magnificent, in a prosaic "let's stuff the calories in at lunchtime in the form of a dirty big lump of cow" kind of way. How I miss meat...

Year of Eating Differently (39): Konditor & Cook, Curzon Cinema, Shaftesbury Avenue

So, I've been away for a few days in Donegal, doing advanced research into blending Guinness and Heineken, and thus hardly felt like eating at all today. The loooong journey home didn't help much either, nor did the continual dry retching. But then again, there's no other in-flight entertainment on Ryanair, so maybe I was doing my thing for everyone else's benefit.
But back on the quest for novelty in food - this time, down to the cinema at the bottom of Soho, the furthest south I've been yet. Feeling rather sick afterwards - a very rich sandwich of pesto and mozzarella and aubergine, which was good, but possibly rather ambitious after the weekend. That, combined with a huge piece of chocolate cake with vanilla icing that felt like it was almost an inch thick, has left me struggling with the world. Only another ten and a half hours before Monday is over, however...

Year of Eating Differently (31): Eagle Diner, Rathbone Place

Med-veg burger, mozzarella, roasted tomatoes, this and that. A little bit cold. Finished it in five bites. Skinny chips were hot and good, mustard mayo wasn't strong enough. Had to resist the urge to join in the conversation on the table next to me about why their company shouldn't change to PHP as a technology platform. Read the start of Pattern Recognition instead.
Bit pricy, considering nobody has bothered to clean the grease off the windows since the place was opened. Otherwise, hit the spot.

Year of Eating Differently (16): Foyles, Charing Cross Road

A day behind on the eating plan, I suppose, due to taking Friday off with Being Ill. Ah well. I'm not posting pictures of me eating soup at home. Sorry.

So, Foyles. Or rather, not the bookshop itself, but the cafe on the first floor. Aubergine and mozzarella baguette, and, (a first since this started) the bread is actually decent - crusty crust, and soft, fresh bread inside. Nice. Haven't eaten aubergine since I can remember, so that's also another plus point, and it's no more expensive than surrounding places. The ambience is nice too (who doesn't like bookshops? Furthermore, it's a bookshop that doesn't play music, unlike the slightly unpleasant Borders over the road, which seems to assume that books must be so dull that you have to have canned music blaring away while you browse.) but unfortunately I had to head straight back to the office to sit down (crashing from drinking a giant latte at Cafe Nero this morning - bit of a tactical error, that).

Anyway, sandwich is great. But better was the cake, which instead of being factory packed like everywhere else (think of that awful bit of shortbread from establishment 13 last week) does a good semblence of being homemade. A jaffa cake, no less - a sponge cake slathered with chocolate icing, and with a smashing orangey bit inside. Spirits lifted, back to counting planes...

Year of Eating Differently (14): Shelly's, Dean Street

So, next door to Make Mine and kind of its personable alter ego. Again, you can specify what you want and somebody constructs it for you, but somehow they have recognisable personalities and actually recognise you if you go back a few times. Ah, the halcyon days when they knew to make me two marmite bagels every morning... And Ian Hislop (he of Private Eye) has a 'usual' when he goes there.

Shelly's tricolore gets toasted in a panini press, and possibly that, combined with somebody not slapping on the oil like their life depended on it, gives you a sandwich that's not half as oily. Ok, it's slightly bland compared to the Make Mine experience, but you don't have that feeling of oh my god I'm going to die soon from this sandwich that Make Mine can inspire. Plus the pesto, the sundried tomatoes, the cheese, the avocado are all perceptible flavours within the hole, rather than the sledgehammer effect of their rivals.
On the downside, service can be a little slow, but you can expect a queue anywhere at lunchtime in Soho. 4.00 for the sandwich.

Year of Eating Differently (9): Make Mine, Dean Street

Nicely packaged, but inside lurks a heart of darkness...

I spent six months eating nothing but Make Mine sandwiches, which probably is part of the motivation for this endeavour. Make Mine have one person taking orders at the till, then a production line of sandwich builders that chuck out your finished order a few minutes later. Works fine when there's nobody else in the shop, but at 1pm on a weekday the place is maxed out and the queue spills out onto the road, so it's not necessarily the best place to grab a quick bite. Contrast that with Shelly's (to be visited later) where the same person takes your order, builds it and then gives it to you. Although they're also really slow when you're in a hurry.
Anyhow, the purple and white colour scheme is intended to make the place look fresh and fun. At first glance, the sandwich shop counterpart to the white and orange of Imli. When you get the sandwich, you realise that fun was accidentally identified with cholesterol and nothing else. The damn thing is dripping oil. It's the closest thing to a dirty burger without there being a burger in it; the sundried tomatoes could just as well be oildrowned tomatoes, the sprig of salad hardly counteracts this, the avocado and mozzarella - well, they're just fat anyway and the foccacia itself has been liberally hosed with pesto that seems to be mostly oil too. Sure, it tastes good for the first bite or two, but by the end you're feeling nauseated by the whole experience and it becomes a triumph of the will to finish the thing off. (Not sure as I should be comparing eating a sandwich to Leni Reifenstahl, but them's the breaks.) Oh, and the foccacia was a bit burnt on one edge.
Tricolore focaccia, £4.00. Shame and guilt, well, I get those for free