Gourmet Sando (グルメサンド)

On the first basement level of the Marunouchi Building, across from Tokyo Station, a counter hands over a sandwich that is still giving off steam. Inside soft white bread sits a slab of dashi-rolled omelette that has been breadcrumbed and fried at high heat, so the first bite shatters at the coating and gives way to a fluffy, savory interior with the smell of stock rising out of it. A separate pot of homemade karashi mustard and lemon mayonnaise comes alongside, which lets the eater decide how sharp to make it. It costs 880 yen. That is the gourmet sando in one object: a single, hand-finished signature item, sold by the piece, priced for its labor.

Sandria in Sapporo reached a similar idea from the opposite end of the clock. The shop dates itself to 1978 and calls itself the first 24-hour handmade sandwich shop in the city, with more than 40 kinds on offer at any time. The best seller is said to be a double-egg sandwich, egg salad and ham with a green leaf, and its appeal is cold, creamy filling against soft bread at an hour when little else in town is open. Where Watanabe sells one fried hero, Sandria sells breadth, a long board of fillings built to order. The two shops share a counter, a case, and the habit of making the sandwich in the same room where it is sold.

The price and the schedule describe each shop's customer. Watanabe keeps weekday office hours, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., 11 to 3 on Saturdays, closed Sundays and holidays, and adds an onion-miso pork sandwich and a shiso-sauce pork sandwich at 980 yen each, with a three-sandwich sample set at 950 yen for the undecided. A plain counter sandwich at a Tokyo chain such as Meruhen ran about 300 yen in 2016, so the 880 yen price asks the buyer to treat lunch as a small occasion. A fried coating softens as the sandwich sits, which means it is built to be carried a short distance and eaten at the desk within the hour.

Making the sandwich in the shop is a technical constraint as much as a sales line. Soft crumb takes moisture from an egg salad, a sauce, or a freshly fried cutlet within hours, so the counter builds close to the moment of sale and sells down. A fried omelette needs the opposite care: oil hot enough to set the crumb before the egg firms and weeps, and a pause before bread and filling meet. When it goes wrong the failure is immediate and legible, a limp coat or a damp slice, which is why the best of these shops stay small, keep short hours, and let the case run empty.

Most buyers meet this tier on the way to somewhere else. Watanabe is takeaway only, so a Marunouchi lunch goes from the basement counter into a bag and up to a desk within minutes, and the fried coat has a short window of crunch. Sandria's round-the-clock hours put the same hand-built sandwich in reach of people coming off a late shift, a plain egg and ham sandwich eaten cold. One chain's catalog of 100-plus varieties a year, such as Meruhen's, shows the other end of the range, breadth over a single hero.

Origin and history

Watanabe's sandwich began as the product of an Osaka restaurant, the creative Japanese kitchen Sosaku Washoku Watanabe. In April 2019 it ran at an Osaka department-store event and sold out seven days in a row, about 5,000 sandwiches in all. The restaurant has since closed.

The Tokyo counter opened on 10 November 2021 in the Marunouchi Building as the brand's first Tokyo shop, run by the group around the original restaurant, with Y.G Group's representative Yutaka Gondo quoted at the launch. The chef who developed the omelette is not named. Sandria's Sapporo counter, which dates itself to 1978, has had more than four decades on its single base.

The sequence has an odd result: the dashimaki fried sando outlived the restaurant that made it, so the sandwich now has a street address in a Marunouchi basement and the kitchen that conceived it does not. A seven-day sell-out of 5,000 pieces in 2019 turned a dish on a restaurant menu into a product that could be sold across a counter by itself.