The club sandwich is a universal truth. A ubiquitous joy. Its place on room service menus is all but assured, and as someone who lives his life out of hotel rooms, I can count on my hands the number of times over the past several years where a club sandwich was either not listed on the menu, or where the kitchen wasn’t willing to put one together by request. In each instance, it was a crushing disappointment.
I’m a feverish admirer of the club sandwich, and it’s unique in the food world as being tied to a very specific time and place. The club sandwich isn’t just found at hotels, it belongs to them. I’ve never ordered a club from a venue that wasn’t within a hotel, and it’s best served when delivered to your room, potentially at some odd hour of the night. Perhaps you’re jetlagged or sick, maybe hungover, or weary of the spicy street food down the block having its way with you once more, and you’re in need of comfort and dependability.
About 29 minutes after you called down with your order — a desperate plea to receive a beloved, reliable stalwart — you answer the door in your robe and bring the dining tray to your bed, making a mess and behaving in a way you never would at home. That’s what hotel room service is for, and it’s the best setting in which to enjoy a club. While it works down by the pool or in the lobby lounge, too, room service is its ideal form and theater.
But how did we end up here?
Exploring the History of the Club Sandwich
Like any good origin story, that of the club sandwich is murky. Storytelling has compounded with fact to create myth. There are disputed dates, locales, and the occasional cognitive leap.
Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “in this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” His quote was lifted from a letter he penned to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy in 1789, but if he wrote the message a century later, he may well have said, “except death, taxes, and the club sandwich.” Because it was 1889 when the most credible early references to what would become the club sandwich as we know it today can be traced.
On Monday, November 18, 1889, The Evening World asked readers in a blurb: “Have you tried a Union Club sandwich yet? Two toasted slices of Graham bread, with a layer of turkey or chicken and ham between them, served warm.”
A day later — man, the Union Club must have had a strong PR game — a longer story titled “An Appetizing Sandwich” ran in The Pittsburg Dispatch, with prior attribution to the New York Sun, referencing a “dainty tidbit” from the Union Club at Fifth Avenue and 21st Street: the very same Union Club Sandwich.
The chef-created marvel was tailor-made for, “Club men who like a good thing after the theater or just before their final nightcap.” I love the implication of multiple nightcaps being the standard, as well as the awed tone at the level of culinary wizardry displayed. “Heretofore, the composition of this sandwich has been a mystery to the world.”
That grand mystery was two thin, toasted pieces of bread with either chicken or turkey, and ham, served warm. Yes, it was a simpler time for the sandwich arts. “An outsider who tasted one of the sandwiches for the first time on Saturday night pronounced the combination ‘delicious.’ That is just what everybody else says to whom the sandwich is served as a novelty.”
Five years later, the sandwich left the city and headed north, keeping to the domain of men’s clubs and parlors. The Saratoga Clubhouse in Saratoga Springs, New York, unveiled its namesake creation in 1894, while making what we can see is a belated claim to inventor status.
The same year, Sarah Tyson Heston Rorer published the recipe book Sandwiches, with a section devoted to the “Club-House Sandwich.” In five years time, the recipe made several crucial evolutionary steps: bacon is called for as an option in place of ham, in addition to the chicken or turkey, and now, lettuce and mayo. Even more crucially, while the sandwich still lacks its signature third slice of bread, its aesthetic is taking shape, as Rorer instructs us to, “cut from one corner to another making two large triangles.”
Club and Club-House sandwiches continue to make numerous published appearances throughout the 1890s and early 1900s. Many variations appear: cold and warm, some include the addition of an egg, the tomato soon joins the fold along with other accompaniments ranging from pickles to olives, and on we go. They became common finds on trains, and some say the sandwich’s extra-stacked appearance came courtesy of the bi-level “club” train cars that debuted in the era and in which they were served. Fact or fiction? We’ll never know, but it sounds too tasty a morsel to be true.
The first published mention of a third slice of bread appeared in 1901, though the transformation didn’t take hold for some years to follow. For the sake of relative brevity, let’s skip ahead three decades to 1931. The Waldorf Astoria moved into its grand Park Avenue digs, and among the luxury outpost’s swankiest offerings was a titillating novelty: room service.
Yes, its well-heeled travelers could now order food to their rooms at any time of the day or night, and what was available from the hotel’s very first menu? The club sandwich. The concept of room service, and the type of food one could order from such a luxe and modern amenity, soon spread far and wide.
What Even is a Club Sandwich & What is It at its Best?
In a world where people can’t even agree on whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich — it absolutely is — good luck trying to pin down the exact specifications of something such as the club sandwich. That may be because you don’t even have a preconceived definition of one. Instead, you know one when you see one, when you hold one, and when you taste one. Let’s give it a whirl, though.
The most accurate definition of the club sandwich is based both on its ingredients as well as its presentation. The club, at its core, is a double-decker sandwich incorporating a third slice of bread. One level could be considered a standalone BLT with mayo. The other may then include turkey or chicken, though it’s not uncommon to see ham added as well. Egg, either fried or in the form of egg salad, or even poached, may well make its way into the fold as well. The bread should be toasted, and the sandwich, in proper architecture, is split into diagonally-sliced quarters, each of which is held in place with a cocktail pick or sandwich skewer.
A rigorous scientific analysis of the 12 most recent club sandwich photos I could find saved in my phone’s archive — a lesson in why “the phone eats first” — offered a telling case study. Of the 12 sandwiches, eaten at 12 hotels across 10 countries and 4 continents, ranging from big cities to island getaways, the results were tallied as such:
- Three-bread construction: 11 of 12
- Cocktail pick stabilization: 11 of 12
- Egg inclusion: 8 of 12
- Diagonal, quarters-slicing: 6 of 12
Small sample sizes notwithstanding, our global survey indicates that the club, as found in the 2020s, is more likely to include an egg than be sliced into beautiful, handheld triangular quarters. I’d personally suggest the latter is more definitive than the former, but I’ve been overruled. In any event, three slices of bread and sandwich skewer stability are damn near mandatory.
But through all of this, the varied components and prerequisites of a club sandwich, its prospective add-ons and potential substitutions and iterations, what is it at its best?
In recent travels, I’ve had wonderful examples at the Bulgari Hotel Tokyo, in which the club sandwich broke up a ten-day long love affair with sushi and ramen; at Reid’s Palace, a Belmond Hotel in Madeira, where the island fortified the sandwich with a dose of beef and cheese, as well as ham, fried egg, and garlic butter on Portuguese bread a la the local Prego staple; at the Jumeirah Burj Al Arab, a club sandwich soothed the soul after a once-in-a-century flooding of the city; at Lefay Resort in Lake Garda, it proved that wellness at a spa hotel can come in many forms. Each of its own, yet true to the category and equal to the task at hand.
That’s because the club sandwich is more than a specific, physical being. At its best, the club sandwich is an idea. An emotion. A loving embrace. An opportunity to let your guard down and a comforting piece of home.
It’s an edible reminder that it’s all going to be alright, despite the 33 hours you traveled, the 11 time zones your body needs to adjust to, and the 6 hours you lost along the way due to what certainly seemed like a preventable travel disruption.
For me, it’s now a shared meal on an early dinner date over which two travelers bonded, and therefore, a food that has become a cherished go-to to be enjoyed together on the many, myriad future trips to come.
We may never be able to perfectly pinpoint when the club sandwich debuted, who created it, or how it became such a staple. We might not even be able to precisely agree on what it is or what it contains, or which variation is its truest or most definitive. But we can agree on its preeminence, both in the sandwich domain and the realm of room service. It is as irreplaceable as it is essential. Somehow fiercely debated yet also immutable. And in the ever-evolving world of luxury hotels and travel, you can bet it’s here to stay.
Feature image courtesy of Bulgari Hotel Tokyo.
