Always at your elbow and often in your hand, the English sandwich yuppified in the 1980s. You knew the good times were back when Marks & Spencer launched the prawn mayo. Today, Pret a Manger (founded 1983) defines upper-middle English sandwichery: cranberry and brie, falafel, salt beef on rye. But “Pret” and its ilk make puny English sandwiches, thin and underpowered. The mighty American sub surfaces in England only in grubby Subway franchises in tourist locations. The real American sub, a succulent monster assembled by an artisanal stacker of deli meats and square cheeses, only hit the Old Country when Tommy’s Sandwiches opened in King’s Cross, central London, in January 2026.

Tommy Ady came to London three years ago to work in tech. Feeling homesick for real food, he invented a proper job as the impresario of Tommy’s Sandwiches. Tommy is on a one-man sub-baking, mayo-squirting, cheese-melting mission to convert London’s snooty sandwich-nibblers to hearty American sub-munchers. I learned this after accosting Tommy and his wife and baby in our local pub. Since moving to London from Boston last year, I have suffered Tommy-style pangs. I miss the smack of provolone, the greasy crunch of eggplant parm and the acid reflux of spicy pastrami. I need to hold something firm and juicy in my hands and let the juice dribble down my chin.

Tommy’s is a slice of West Coast sandwichery — two slices, really — on the grittily Dickensian road from Kings Cross to the City of London. Tourists used to come to King’s Cross for heroin, prostitutes and the train to Scotland. Today, they come for the train and King’s Cross’s gentrified industrial Victoriana. The old goods yard is full of restaurants. Google has moved in. The coffee shops are multiplying like chlamydia. 

A native of Washington state, Tommy worked in Subways and then moved to San Francisco. The chassis of his sandwiches is straight off the red-eye from the city of fog and fentanyl: an airy Dutch Crunch sub, baked from scratch with a rice-flour-based topping that bakes into a mottled, “tiger bread” finish. No one else bakes Dutch Crunch in London. Tommy’s is also unique in the stuffing and sauce department. Your typical British “sarnie” has more bread than filling. The English take their sandwiches dry, like their humor. They moisten with butter, not sauces. Condiments are rationed: a smear of pickle chutney with cheese, or a splash of ketchup in a bacon roll. Salad is a soggy lettuce leaf. 

Tommy disburses stuffings and sauces to hungry locals as the GIs seduced their grandmothers with Camels and nylon stockings. Handfuls of meat, a bounteous 70-30 ratio of stuffing to bread, clumps of rocket salad and multiple cascades of flavored sauces. Tommy sources everything locally. Through sheer dedication, he tracked down an orange English cheddar that replicates the melted-plastic mouth feel of “American cheese” and a holy grail, a Swiss cheese that couldn’t find Geneva on a map. The Soda Folk root beer in the fridge is brewed in England by another expatriate American who missed the taste of the States, Colorado-born Ken Graham. 

“To make an American pickle in the UK is very challenging,” Tommy says. “The cucumbers are huge.” He imports the standalone sweet pickles on the side from Germany and re-brines them in the basement where he blends the dressings.

To test Tommy’s handiwork to destruction, I took one of my homesick American daughters, 18-year-old Alma (smoked turkey, Havarti cheese, sriracha mayo), and the most English friend I could find. Alex Larman (cheese and pickle) is a man of letters and lunches whose most recent restaurant-reviewing assignments include the historic Paris brasserie La Coupole and the Michelin-starred modern British of Tom Brown at the Capital. We test Tommy’s range by ordering some classics: a Mafia (ham, regular and spicy salami, lettuce, tomato, red onion, avocado, mayo, honey mustard), a Hoon (mozzarella, pesto, rocket, tomato, balsamic mayo, gremolata) and a Rainier (roast beef, Swiss cheese, rocket, red onion, crispy shallots, jalapeno mayo, Dijon mustard).

“The British sandwich is boring,” Alex says as Tommy whips a fresh sub from the oven, slices it laterally and sprays its fluffy innards with mayo like a fireman attending a plane crash. 

“The Italian sandwich is about ingredients,” Tommy explains, stacking the meats, hiding the salami under a carapace of cheese and flipping the semiloaded sub into the toaster. “The American sandwich is about complexity.”

“You’ve got a lot of compound mayos,” Alma muses as Tommy hoses down a Hoon with his personal-blend balsamic mayo. Young people, he says, get the concept immediately. But older English sandwich-munchers often require encouragement, especially with the root beer.

The tasting begins with a palate-cleansing slurp of Soda Folk. 

“This reminds me of America,” Alma says, entering a Proustian reverie. “It’s the supermarket and the school fair.”

“This is my first root beer,” Alex gargles like a wine connoisseur. “It is medicinal. But it’s good. It’s got a brilliant aftertaste. Ooh, that’s lovely.”

We start with the Hoon. The bread is so light that the crunchy crust leads straight to the introductory blast of balsamic. The flavor then broadens through creamy mozzarella and peppery rocket to sweet pesto.

“This tastes nothing like what you’d get in the high street,” Alex says. “This tastes generous. It tastes fresh. It’s a tenner, which is more than Pret, but it’s huge. I would struggle to eat one of these alone. It’s half for breakfast, half for lunch.”

As Alma describes the childhood staple she called Sandwich of the Gods (mayo, smoked turkey, Swiss, mustard, pickles), Alex launches into the meaty Mafia and surfaces with a mouthful of moist pork.

“This is serious. I feel I’m on the West Coast. I couldn’t take up rollerblading, but I could take it to go. It’s the lightness, even with a huge amount of meat.”

“I’m getting jalapeno,” Alma attacks a Rainier. “The beef is delicious. The toasted shallots are almost Japanese. It’s taking me back to Harvard Square.” The pasta salad, she says, is the taste of kiddush at synagogue. The chocolate cookies are meltingly soft.

“This is up there with the greatest sandwiches of my life,” Alex affirms. “Absolute sandwich heaven.” Better, he says, than the jambon et beurre (ham and butter) he had in Paris. “It’s maximalist.” 

THE FRIENDS OF JEFFREY EPSTEIN 

Tommy’s English regulars love the expansive gustatory horizons. Americans come for a taste of home. Tommy says that one homesick American woman started to tear up in the shop when she tasted his subs. “Every time Americans walk in, they’re like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been looking for this!” Discerning tourists load up at Tommy’s before taking the Edinburgh train from Kings Cross or the Paris train from the adjacent St. Pancras.   

The ultimate trans-Atlantic crossover munch is in development: a sub that combines the variety of the American sub with the distinctive tang of the English umami, Marmite. Meanwhile, Tommy is about to double the sub menu and take on the natives on another part of their home turf. “Brits have a definition of a breakfast that’s primarily beige,” Tommy says. “We’ll have egg and bacon, but it’ll be in a tortilla. We will not call it a wrap. We’ll call it a burrito.” 

Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.