There’s no sugar-coating it, Fat Pat’s is in a pretty filthy alley. Not pointing the finger at anyone in particular, a lot of businesses share it, and you know who you are, but it’s filthy, and objectively so. There are catering size tin cans full of rain water and fag butts, and it’s lined with big industrial bins. 15 of them, doing a quick head count. That’s just loads of bins.
A few doors down is a massage parlour called Tropical Palms, and there’s a van tipping out crates upon crates of mushrooms for one of the Chinese restaurants on Faulkner Street. ‘It ain’t The Ritz’ is a phrase that gets bandied around a fair bit, but this really isn’t. It is very much not The Ritz. You get the picture anyway.
At the vaguely cleaner end of the filthy alley - shades of grey here - Fat Pat’s is not really anything more than a hole in the wall, with stairs leading up to its kitchen, and on the two times I went last week, you can’t see much more than the occasional flurry of movement, a heat lamp and some legs at the top of the stairs as sandwiches are packed into brown paper bags.
Because sandwiches is the business of Fat Pat’s, which set up shop at the back of Portland Street a few months ago (it was in Chorlton for a spell before that). And what sandwiches they are. Wheeling back to The Ritz for a minute, if they served sandwiches like this for their afternoon tea, rather than the dainty, crusts-off finger cut type, I’d be far more inclined to pony up the 89 quid that they charge for it.
I’ve had some life-changing sandwiches in my time. The stacked-high Reuben from Katz’s Deli in New York. The famous salt beef bagel with hot mustard from the Beigel Bake on Brick Lane in London. What Fat Pat’s is doing is easily on a par. The Philly cheesesteak, for example, is so great that I have one two days running.
It’s made with ribeye steak, which has been sliced impossibly finely - some recipes freeze the raw steak first, and then cut it - and then marinated in ‘new bay' seasoning, slathered in sauce montréal (somewhere between a spicy mayo and thousand island) and layered with crispy shallots and caramelised onions so slow-cooked and buttery that they dissolve.
The hot steak is then topped with Cheese Whiz, the American liquid cheese which is the topping of choice for Philly cheesesteaks across the US. The whole lot is then unceremoniously crammed into a soft eight-inch milk roll, before being crammed into my face on a bench on St Peter’s Square.
At £10, it’s not a budget option by any stretch, nor is it a daily option, least of all because of the calories involved (luckily it appears that Fat Pat’s doesn’t employ more than 250 people, so we may never know exactly how many). But it could quite conceivably feed two, particularly if you chuck in a portion of ‘ziggy fries’, Pat’s very cute chips, cut like coiled slinkys.
Also ordered and devoured in unseemly fashion is Pat’s hot honey fried chicken (also £10), a bit more complicated but just as impressive. It comprises two fried, crispy-chewy chicken cutlets, a mild Nashville spice blend, hot honey, banana pickles, buttermilk ranch dressing, romaine lettuce, tomatoes, oregano and tangy hot sauce. Wear a bib and have a heap of napkins in close clawing distance, because you will make an exhibition of yourself.
There’s a pretty stunning muffuletta (£8) to go at too, the Italian answer to the multi-decker sandwiches from Scooby Doo. This one has aubergine cutlets fried in panko crumbs, pesto, mozzarella, artichokes, marinated peppers, wild rocket, olive tapenade, parmesan, sun-dried tomatoes, sweet balsamic and fresh herbs. The artichokes make it, as does the lacy skirt of golden fried parmesan around the aubergine. It’s another 10/10.
This isn’t refined food, but you could never say that it’s not complex - numerous ingredients and countless processes are going into making these the best sandwiches in the city, and some of the best I’ve ever had (very sorry, Bada Bing, but that’s the fact of the matter).
From the bread through to the in-house sauces, the humble sandwich is seriously elevated here, plus they give 2.5% of all profits to charity. The claim on the website is that they’re ‘changing the sarnie game, one sando at a time’. Big words. But by this evidence, pretty well justified.
Fat Pat's, 88 Portland Street, M1 4GX
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