Upper crust

The world’s best sandwich is a ham and butter baguette sold at Le Petit Vendôme in Paris for €6. Cornichons, available in little ceramic jars on the counter, are included. Each sandwich is made to order and once it is ready you can either take it with you or wait for space to open up at the bar. One Friday afternoon, I sat eating one at the bar, behind which there was a giant mound of butter like a birthday cake with a butter knife sticking vertically out the top for a candle. The slices of ham tucked inside the sandwich were like folds of velvet: pale pink and perfectly soft.

The owner of the bistro, Gilles Caussade, discovered that his jambon beurre was the best in the world last year, when a regular customer came in one day to ask if he had seen the accolade announced by Time Out. “I got in touch with them and asked why?” Caussade tells me. “They said because it’s very simple but with high quality ingredients – there’s no tomatoes that have no taste.”

Of course, a tomato, flavourful or otherwise, does not belong in a jambon beurre, the key to which is the strict simplicity its name indicates. That simplicity has seen the sandwich become the if you know you know go-to for foodies in London. Brixton deli Naughty Piglets runs a weekly “Don’t Fuck With Jambon Beurre” menu, where the cold, salted butter layer of the sandwich is pressed into the bread in slabs so thick that biting it leaves teeth marks. Meanwhile, there was outcry in April when Pret’s jambon beurre sandwich disappeared from shelves temporarily due to a cornichon shortage, the response suggesting the sandwich had more of a cult following than you might expect.

In Paris, jambon beurre lovers tell you to go to either Le Petit Vendôme or Chez Aline in the Upper Marais area of the 11th arrondissement. Both are purists, selling simply a ham and butter baguette. “It is the one that we sell most and it is a very Parisian tradition,” Caussade says. “It was not always very good but it goes back a long way.”

In the 1970s, Caussade was the president of the haute couture fashion label Madame Grès, located at Place Vendôme in Paris. When female clients from the east coast of America would fly over for dress fittings, he would take them and their husbands out to eat at Michelin star restaurants. But the place they really enjoyed visiting was Le Petit Vendôme, a bistro which had been in the 1st arrondissement, just around the corner from the Ritz, since the late 1950s.

“It had a very bistro, Parisian spirit,” he says. “Very low-key but alive, with a lot of social mix. You have the president of Cartier, you have secretaries, you have workers, you have students, you have a lot of Parisians, and you have tourists.” On the afternoon I visit, the restaurant is showing off that very spirit. Staff behind the bar are laughing as they distribute cold beers to a soundtrack of European 1980s disco music. When a well-dressed American tourist drops money into the tip jar on the counter, two tradesmen cheer.

In 2012, Caussade bought Le Petit Vendôme, opening for the evening service but keeping its tradition of excellent sandwiches comprising five key ingredients, which he passionately launches into listing. “The first one is very good bread which has to sing, if you touch the bread – it crackles. It’s a baguette closed on one side, not cut in two,” he says. “The second ingredient is artisanal, Normandy butter, not industrial butter, so it has a rich taste.

“The third is very high quality cold cuts coming mostly from Auvergne, the origin of the bistro, in the centre of France. The fourth is that every sandwich is prepared at demand of the clients; not one sandwich is prepared in advance. If you have a good sandwich, and you put it in the refrigerated window, for one, two, three hours, it’s not the same. And the last, the most important, is generosity. We don’t put one slice of ham, we put ham. It has to be filled up. That’s the way it is.”

Time Out’s proclamation that Caussade’s jambon beurre is the best in the world has brought global foodies and influencers to his door, but it was already an open secret. In July 2024, the morning after playing the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris, Lady Gaga came in alone, ordered two sandwiches, and ate at the counter.

Illustration by Oscar Ingham for The Observer