NEXT month, Pret A Manger plans to launch a new, mayonnaise-free sandwich line – and it won’t come a minute too soon.
Mayo is the menace that has gummed up the heavily hyped British chain’s rollout in New York, where it recently closed three of 16 shops and tabled plans to open more.
A poster at my nearest Pret A Manger branch reads: “God is in the Mayonnaise.”
But what’s really in Pret’s mayo, it turns out, are guar gum, xanthan gum and locust bean gum – “extenders” that add more bloat to the most bloat-inducing dressing around.
And despite Pret’s boast that it “prefers to use fresh, natural, additive-free ingredients from local suppliers,” it ships all its mayo in from Britain. The stuff – which has a three-month shelf life – arrives in jumbo containers that would give Hans Blix pause.
It’s nice that after nearly two years of watching New Yorkers shun the stuff, Pret has finally gotten around to coming out with an alternative – but what took so long?
How could the chain push mayonnaise in a city where the workforce spends half its salary on health clubs and the other half on diet books?
Piling on the mayo ranks with chocolate-fudge yogurt as a dietary oxymoron.
A few weeks ago, a Pret honcho acknowledged having “mayonnaise issues” in New York. If they were that ignorant of the territory, they must have been shocked to learn that a traffic circle here is not a “circus.”
Pret’s people argue that a sandwich needs moisture. Apparently, they’ve never heard of mustard or olive oil – or even Hellman’s, which at least contains no “extender” gums.
Food development director Claudia Fleming says that Pret imports British mayo because “it’s a unique Pret recipe and we have not yet found anybody to make it here in the U.S.”
“Pret was founded on great-tasting food and didn’t really cater to anybody’s dietary whims. Frankly, we just tried to pick up the U.K. model here.”
As a restaurant critic who also cares about lunchtime, I welcomed Pret A Manger when it debuted here two years ago. New York’s fast food can use all the help it can get, and Pret’s sandwiches that shun “obscure chemicals, additives and preservatives” seemed right on the money.
But once they yanked my favorite sandwich, the Cubano, I discovered that almost everything else had enough mayonnaise for a sadistic “New Age” spa treatment.
Even ones without mayo contained something too close for comfort, like egg-laden Caesar dressing slathered onto a baguette with salami and mozzarella. But lately I’ve noticed fewer fatty condiments on Pret’s shelves and more of an effort to join the modern world.
Pret’s mayo-less products are much better. “Green dragon” sauce on a new Asian chicken salad sandwich adds mustard and lemon zest to basil and cucumber with remarkably bright flavors for this time of year – a reminder of why I liked Pret in the first place.
Such choices will save us from blimping out, and save Pret from going the way of the automat.
