Shiels: The Sandwich Shop Discovers the Bistro

A Steak Canadian, an identity crisis and a local sandwich shop trying to work out which traditions are worth keeping.

By R. D. Kerr

Whenever I spend any real time in a new place, I want to know where the local bakery is. The deli too, if there is one, and the sandwich shop everybody locally seems to know about. I want to know where the nearest petrol station is for the inevitable two-in-the-morning family emergency, and where I can get something decent to eat when nobody can be bothered cooking.

A wonderful view may make you want to live somewhere. Knowing where you can get fed makes actually living there considerably easier.

The good local sandwich shop is one of those small bits of infrastructure we rarely notice until it disappears. An Aladdin’s cave of molten, golden, griddled things pressed between bread, it feeds people before work, at lunch, through hangovers and on those Mondays when a family has collectively decided the kitchen can look after itself. They are often local not-so-secret secrets, easily discovered if you bother to look, but there are fewer of them than there were.

Hospitality generally has to decide how much of itself to change. Some traditional businesses seem convinced the world will eventually come back for them. Others modernise so enthusiastically that very little remains of the place people originally liked. Shiels, on Fiddlers Lane in Irlam, appears to be trying something in between.

I arrived before opening. This was my fault rather than theirs, and gave me time to look through the windows and wonder what, exactly, I had come to review.

The sign says sandwich shop. It also says bistro.

Inside, exposed brick and contemporary pictures sit alongside a portrait of Shiels. It is pleasant, but I had the odd sensation that an Irlam sandwich shop had spent a weekend in the Northern Quarter and come home with ideas. The menu, however, was reassuringly familiar: breakfasts, hot fillings, barms and the sort of things that require a griddle rather than reinvention.

The bakery side was thinner. There was little in the way of cream cakes and none of the northern pasty-shop staples I had expected to see. Demand may explain that, but the early customer has particular needs. Somebody heading to work first thing in the morning is unlikely to be thinking about lunch, and this is traditionally where shops like this have been useful.

The opening hours puzzled me as well. The daytime sandwich shop closes at around two, which seemed an oddly restrictive habit to retain while so much else about the place was being reconsidered.

Only afterwards did I discover that Shiels also operates a bistro format from the same premises. Suddenly the sign made considerably more sense, and the idea itself intrigued me. Making one building work in different ways is perfectly sensible in the present hospitality market, and I may well return to try the restaurant.

There is, however, a problem in discovering an interesting second half to a business only after you have gone home and looked it up. I had sat beneath the word “Bistro” without really understanding what Shiels meant by it. If the idea is enough to make me want to return, it deserves to be communicated well enough for me to know about it while I am there.

For now, I had come for a sandwich.

When eating out, I tend to make a beeline for something I cannot properly reproduce with the equipment I have at home. I can cook steak and onions perfectly well. What I do not own is a griddle, which meant the steak Canadian had very little competition.

Thinly sliced steak, grilled onions and gravy in a barm is one of those foods that does not benefit greatly from improvement. The improvement happened when somebody first put the ingredients together. After that, the sensible course is to leave them alone and get the griddle hot.

Shiels gets this right. The barm was fresh that day, soft and cool in the local style, with everything inside still hot from the griddle. The steak was properly thin and the onions had caught here and there at the edges. The gravy was thick too, soaking into the bread rather than immediately making a break for my wrist.

It was a little salty, but then I had voluntarily ordered steak, onions and gravy in bread. There are occasions when a man has to accept some responsibility for his own decisions.

More importantly, it tasted right. The individual ingredients are not remarkable, nor do they need to be. Food like this depends upon heat, timing and repetition. A frying pan at home can give me steak and onions; it does not quite give me this. That distinction is part of the reason the sandwich shop still has a purpose.

The Canadian arrived in a paper bag, and I washed it down with a latte, though by halfway through I began to think tea might have understood the assignment better. The prices are reasonable and the portions generous enough. The staff were friendly too. I spent a few quid with a local business, ate well and left full. Sometimes that is all you want from a sandwich shop.

The music was rather less straightforward. At some point, “From the Window to the Wall” arrived from the back at considerable volume while I was eating my sandwich. Perhaps this is where the bistro begins. I am still not entirely sure.

What Shiels is attempting is part of a wider change in hospitality. You can see it elsewhere too. Over in North Wales, Nick Rudge, chef-owner of The Jackdaw in Conwy, is preparing to open The Nest, a more relaxed and affordable sibling to his fine-dining restaurant, bringing burgers, Welsh fish, toasties and sandwiches into the offer. Fine dining, apparently, is discovering the sandwich at roughly the same moment the sandwich shop is discovering the bistro.

They are approaching the problem from opposite directions, but the problem is much the same. People still want good food; they also want affordability, convenience and places that fit into ordinary life. Hospitality needs new reasons for people to walk through the door without throwing away the reasons they came through it in the first place.

That is where Shiels leaves me hopeful, intrigued and still slightly confused. I would like to see more thought given to the early customer, and I would certainly make the relationship between the sandwich shop and the bistro clearer. There are probably ideas worth borrowing from cafés elsewhere too. Better coffee rarely hurts, and I maintain that books improve almost any room, although I accept that this may be personal prejudice rather than sound commercial advice.

What I would not meddle with is the Canadian.

Fresh local barm, thin steak from a hot griddle, onions allowed to catch and gravy thick enough to stay roughly where it was put. Friendly service, a sensible price and some money left with a local business.

The traditional sandwich shop does not need preserving in aspic. It needs to know which traditions are assets and which are merely habits. Shiels seems to be working that out, and the bistro has made me curious enough to return and see where it ends up.

If I still cannot work out where the bistro begins, at least I know what to order.