For a certain section of the British population, namely white-collar office workers in London and the other major urban centers, the sandwich chain Pret a Manger has an immense, multivalent significance. It is a concocted realm—French name, pressed aluminum floors, average coffee—that is as familiar as your childhood bedroom. There are parts of the capital where it feels like there are more Prets than street corners. (There are four branches within five hundred metres of King’s Cross train station.) On a given day, I can walk into any of these and choose a ham-and-cheese baguette, a Pret bar (a kind of flapjack), and a bottle of ginger lemonade from shining refrigerated shelves, stand in line, smile jovially enough, pay £7.39, and walk out again, steering by muscle memory alone.
Pret aims to serve customers in sixty seconds or less. The food is expensive, by British office-lunch standards, but not terrifically so. Pret combines a sniff of indulgence (there is basil on the prosciutto; the granola has bite) with maximal efficiency and a dose of passive adrenaline. The stores are noisy. Staffers are encouraged to shout and express their personalities. The company calls this the “Pret buzz.” Entering an outlet on your fifteen-minute lunch break, taking a macaroni-and-cheese from the hot shelf, rather than your usual chicken-and-avocado sandwich on granary bread, is an experience both of individual agency and of surrender to the mordant, relentless rhythm of office life. Pret signifies a momentary escape from work and is entirely identified with it as well. I have Proustian memories, and not in a good way, of the various times when deadlines, train delays, unfeeling bosses, and the crud and crap of making a living in a big city have driven me, alone, to eat a Pret sandwich for my dinner.
When the pandemic stopped people from going to their offices, in March, Pret a Manger was an immediate economic casualty. The chain had grown steadily for thirty-four years, smothering the United Kingdom’s commercial districts, expanding into airport departure lounges, taking chia seeds to Aberdeen and cheese-and-pickle baguettes to Dubai. In 2018, Pret’s five hundred and thirty stores, which include eighty-five branches in the United States, were acquired by JAB Holding Company, a investment fund in Luxembourg, for two billion dollars. Under lockdown, they closed. In July, with sales down seventy-four per cent in 2020, the company announced that thirty of its U.K. stores would not reopen. A month later, about a third of Pret’s employees lost their jobs.
The damage to Pret signified something more than trouble for another quick-service restaurant chain. For a disproportionate quantity of Britain’s politicians, business executives, and journalists, the Pret buzz—tactile, hectic, caffeinated, everything tasting somehow the same—stood for work itself. (In 2012, Pret’s former chief executive, Clive Schlee, told the Daily Telegraph that the first thing he looked for in a store was whether the staff members were touching one another. “I can almost predict sales on body language alone,” he said; the company has been criticized for the “affective labor” that it demands of its baristas.) During the summer, as the lockdown eased, government ministers, including the country’s voguish Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, were photographed coming out of Pret, to demonstrate their adherence to rules around face masks and to suggest that office life was safe again. When the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, urged people back to work in city centers, in order to restart the economy, the shift in policy was widely abbreviated as “Save Pret.” When, as predicted, this helped lead to a surge in coronavirus cases in September, prompting new restrictions and advice to start working from home again, people on Twitter shortened the next iteration of rules to “Fuck Pret.”
A few hours after the newest regulations were announced, I met Pano Christou, Pret a Manger’s current chief executive, outside the company’s headquarters, in Victoria, Central London. Christou, who is forty-two, took the job last September. He was wearing jeans, a dark-green Oxford shirt, cream-colored sneakers, and a disposable medical mask. Victoria has one of London’s main commuter railway stations and adjoins Westminster, so it is usually heaving with government employees, tourists, and students. Christou wandered into a shopping complex. It was 1 P.M., peak lunchtime crush. He estimated the traffic at about a third or half of pre-pandemic levels. “It’s been quite static over the last two to three weeks,” he said. “I think that the pattern has probably gone from slightly improving to . . . kind of monotone.” Nearby theatres that were staging the London productions of “Hamilton” and “Wicked” had been shuttered since the spring. “Is it ‘Shaun of the Dead’?” Christou wondered aloud. “You know, where you are walking through the city, and there are zombies but not really much else? Sometimes there’s an element of that.”
We stopped by a Veggie Pret, one of the chain’s ten vegetarian branches, which Christou had been keen to increase when he became C.E.O. “Opening new stores is on pause at the moment,” he said. The outlet wasn’t quiet, but there wasn’t a buzz, either. That morning, the government had announced a 10 P.M. curfew for pubs and restaurants, to slow the spread of the coronavirus; all venues would have to operate with table service only. It wasn’t yet clear whether sandwich bars and cafés were included. “What does that mean for us?” Christou said. “As of right now, I’m not quite sure.” (Later that day, officials clarified that Pret was exempt from the new table-service regulation.)
The rules for Pret were complicated enough already: customers buying food and drinks to take away had to wear a face mask, but those who chose to eat in could go without. The distinction was lightly enforced. Six months into the pandemic, England’s coronavirus rules are a forbidding manual of “linked households,” “qualifying groups,” and “section 63 type gatherings.” Fifteen people can go to a wedding; thirty people can go to a funeral; six people can play indoor soccer. It is possible to stage a COVID-19-secure protest. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland all have their own regulations.
Christou wore his mask in Veggie Pret. “There are many good examples around the world of countries that have done this well,” he said. Pret staffs in Hong Kong and mainland Europe have kept Christou abreast of measures to slow the virus. “Sometimes you think to yourself, Wouldn’t you just copy and paste?” He asked if I had signed up for Pret’s new hot-drink subscription service, which gives you unlimited coffees for twenty pounds a month. “Greatest deal in the country,” Christou said.
We turned down Victoria Street, to number 75b, where the first Pret opened, in 1986. The store was now a hair salon. The chain was founded by Julian Metcalfe and Sinclair Beecham, two university graduates who were fed up with London’s dismal sandwich bars and fast-food options. The first Pret a Manger was a delicatessen, with bowls of fresh salad, ham, and cheese, along with store-made sandwiches, which proved a hit. “We started by selling the obvious sandwiches. Cheese,” Metcalfe told me a few years ago, for an article that I wrote about the British sandwich industry. “And I realized, why can’t we do leg of lamb with mint?” In Pret’s early years, it was a gastronomic outlier. Metcalfe’s crayfish-and-arugula sandwich (now discontinued) changed the London lunch break forever. Christou joined Pret in 2000, after working at McDonald’s. His first job as a store manager was at 75b Victoria Street. “Fridges to the left-hand side and the till counter right at the back,” he said, peering into the salon. “Very narrow shop. Takeaway only.”
During the pandemic, Christou has sought Metcalfe and Beecham’s advice. Beecham urged him to rediscover Pret’s original, pioneering spirit. “He said to me, ‘Pano, one of the biggest problems of the last five to ten years is that you have become risk-averse. Your culture has almost stifled you from change,’ ” Christou related. “ ‘There are so many sacred cows. When Julian and I started, we were killing sacred cows, three or four of those a day, every single day.’ ”
Pret’s main response to the crisis has been to shrink its menu by around a third, launch its coffee deal, and offer home delivery, after years of being wary of diluting the Pret buzz. In the U.K., the chain has joined UberEats and Deliveroo. In the U.S., Pret is available through Grubhub and carries out “office drops” to businesses that have closed their cafeterias or want a branded Pret shelf in their lobbies. “How can we bring Pret to the people? That is the term I would use,” Christou said. I asked him if a Pret lunch would ever taste as good at home as it did in the office. “Er, I’d say so, definitely,” he replied. (I ordered a Pret delivery a couple of days later. It took thirty-two minutes to arrive. It cost me almost four pounds in delivery charges. It made me feel sad.) Christou conceded that the chain’s various delivery options, which make up about five per cent of its sales, would never replace the main event. “They’re cherries on the cake,” he said. “They’re not the cake.”
We passed a shuttered Pret on Sutton Ground, a narrow street near Scotland Yard that normally has a busy street-food market. A handful of stalls were operating. There was a sign hanging sideways in the Pret storefront. “Sad,” Christou said. But, a few streets away, close to various government ministries, we stopped at a branch on Great Peter Street. Beatrice Mwangi, the store manager, said that a customer had returned to work for the first time that day, found her favorite sandwich (tuna-and-cucumber baguette), and come over to celebrate. “You don’t really get people complaining,” Mwangi said, of the pandemic office crowd. “It’s quite nice to see.” Sales at the store, which is across the street from the Home Office, were down two-thirds compared to the same period last year. Earlier in the week, HuffPost UK had reported that staff at the Home Office, which is in charge of border control and the police, had been asked to “bring food and drink from home to prevent having to go to shops and stores.” Above his mask, Christou raised his eyebrows.
Lunch break was ending. Christou had to get back to the office. He grew up in Tooting, in South London, going to fish-and-chip shops and fast-food places. Before the pandemic, one of his goals was to further democratize Pret and reach consumers who had previously been deterred by its bourgeois reputation. “I think Pret has an affordable, high-quality product that is available for anyone and everyone,” Christou said. Any expansion was now in doubt. That morning, Boris Johnson had said that Britain’s new coronavirus regulations would probably be in place for six months. Two days later, the country recorded more than six thousand new cases of COVID-19, the highest daily total since May. I asked Christou if he woke up in the morning wishing that life could return to how it was—which is what Pret a Manger, with its affective labor, its illusion of luxury and freedom, signifies for most of us. He said no. “I want things to be better,” he said. “What the new better is, I guess at the moment we don’t know.”
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