Club Sandwich

At Durrants Hotel on George Street in Marylebone, the club sandwich on the room-service menu is a stack of grilled chicken breast, bacon, plum tomato, baby gem and mayonnaise, topped with a fried egg and sent up with fries. The egg changes how it eats. Press the cocktail stick down through the top triangle and the yolk gives way into the mayonnaise, so the first quarter is richer and softer than the last, and the toast on the top slice takes on a yellow sheen. It is a sandwich with a clear British hotel reading: the chicken is grilled, the egg is fried, and the plate comes out as a small meal.

Two floors of filling sit on three slices of toast, and the middle slice carries the weight. Thin bread toasted until it rattles against the knife is what lets a tall sandwich be cut into four and lifted without the tiers sliding. At Claridge's the bread is pain de mie, the fine-crumbed square loaf, which gives slices of even thickness and a crust that goes golden and brittle under the grill. That evenness matters when the cook cuts on the diagonal, because every triangle then stands on its point with the layers lined up. The tomato sits against the lettuce and a thin film of mayonnaise seals the toast, which keeps the crunch alive for the ten minutes between the pass and the bedside table.

The sandwich belongs to the hours when the kitchen is otherwise quiet. A tray with a silver cover, a napkin folded over the cutlery and a heap of fries at the edge of the plate is how a club reaches a hotel bedroom after a late train into London. The toast is still warm when the cover lifts, the bacon gives a short snap, and the lettuce and tomato stay cool against it, so each bite runs hot and cold at once. The sticks come out one at a time. Hotel bars serve the same stack at a low table with a gin, and the stack does not change with the setting: three slices, two fillings, four triangles.

Bacon does most of the seasoning. It is cooked until it breaks cleanly, then laid flat so it adds a firm layer in the middle of the stack, and its salt reaches the mayonnaise and the tomato without any other seasoning on the plate. Chicken is the mild layer: grilled breast sliced thin enough to bend with the bite. Baby gem brings small, ribbed leaves that stay crisp against the warm toast. A hotel kitchen builds one of these in a minute or two with parts already prepped on the pass, and the order is the same every time, which is much of what a guest is paying for.

On a British menu the club sandwich usually sits in the middle of the page, between the soups and the burgers, and is priced as a main course. The accompaniment decides the mood. Fries make it a hotel plate; crisps and a handful of dressed leaves make it a pub lunch or a lounge order. The stack is easy to adapt, since the fried egg at Durrants shows how a kitchen can add a single element and leave the rest of the architecture alone, and guests ordering a club expect the cocktail sticks and the diagonal cut as much as they expect the chicken.

Origin and history

Durrants Hotel stands at 26-32 George Street, a terrace of town houses dating from the late eighteenth century that has been a hotel since the early nineteenth, and the hotel says the Miller family has run it for a century. Its room-service card lists the club sandwich as grilled chicken breast, bacon, plum tomato, baby gem, mayonnaise and a fried egg, served with fries.

The name itself is usually traced to American club-house and hotel menus of the 1890s, and the British trade adopted the three-decker with its American name. No first British menu, cook or hotel is established, so the sandwich arrives in Britain undated and anonymous, a dish learned from the page of a menu. London hotels placed it on room-service and bar lists, and Claridge's still serves one on toasted pain de mie.

The egg is the detail worth ordering for, since it turns the club into a late supper with a yolk to break. That is the sandwich Durrants prints today on its June 2025 room-service menu, with the fries beside it.