Light and tasty

I think we ended 2009 with sandwiches so it is appropriate perhaps to start 2010 with them too. Before we get bogged down in the avalanche of fake Italian…too many mixed metaphors there so I’ll stop.

Anyway, Sandwich & Co is a sweet little four table open air eaterie attached to a deli in a Bandra bylane. White picket fence and café; tables and chairs and a sound system, that for some inexplicable reason plays techno-house-electronica.

Inexplicable because for that music to work you need some serious mental lubrication and Sandwich & Co is strictly teetotal — coffee, aerated waters and stuff like that. No daaru, then there should be no dum-dum-dum music, see?

Anyway, again, anyway… I think I’ve spent too much time on Twitter, leading to these irrelevant sentences and desperate attempts to be clever in 140 characters. It’s like a disease. Back to the sandwiches then. The selection is small but it covers all the sort of deli stuff you would expect — arugula, brie, cranberry, couldn’t find something that started with ‘d’. The vegetarian sandwiches went well beyond lettuce and tomato (or thinly sliced cucumber) and a real attempt made to make them attractive. Was almost tempted but then succumbed to salmon, or a lox and cream cheese bagel.

Rock chick — overjoyed at being able to smoke and eat at the same time — asked for an off-menu bacon lettuce tomato which was agreed to immediately. While waiting for the sandwiches, had a walk round the tiny deli which was however well-stocked with a variety of cheeses and cold cuts, except for an apparent shortage of sausages, which were all chicken by popular demand apparently. As rock chick pointed out, the world is coming to an end when the people of Bandra prefer chicken sausages to pork. But that’s the way it seems to be.

The sandwiches came quickly enough. The salmon and cream cheese was well-balanced — stingy with neither and no overpowering of tastes. The capers added the vital tangy touch to give the sandwich a lift and something to cut the other two flavours.

The BLT was one of the best I’ve had recently. Again, a good and balanced mix of all the ingredients. Often, lettuce tends to dominate and you scramble to find bits of bacon. Here, every mouthful gave you all three. The portions were very generous too — much bigger than the bagel.

Only two possible complaints — very little choice on the drinking front and those little packets of branded wafers served on each plate which didn’t somehow match the whole ambience. It might have been better to have just served us some good quality chips without the packet. Or French fries or something.

For dessert we got a complimentary fresh strawberry tart — they were trying it out — and ordered a Lindt cupcake. The tart was excellent — fresh strawberries, sweet patisserie cream, crumbly but crisp pastry. Even the chocolate-obsessed rock chick jumped to it. The cupcake was also good — soft cake, great gooey chocolate icing. Not too sweet.

All in all, a very satisfying experience. If someone opened a bar next door, it would have been perfect. Someone? Anyone?