A Fresh Start

I have been thinking a lot about lunch lately. Not in the abstract, not as a concept, but as the thing that happens every day in our coffee shops when someone walks in, looks at what we have, and decides whether it's worth staying for. That moment matters to me. It has always mattered to me. And for a while I have felt that we were not doing it justice.

Our food offering in the coffee shops had drifted. Not dramatically, not overnight, but gradually, in the way these things tend to happen when you're busy looking at everything else. And to be perfectly honest I felt that it was not as good as it could be. So rather than tinker around the edges or hope nobody noticed, we made the decision in December to start again.

Today, across all eleven Honesty sites, we are launching a completely new food range.

We have over twenty freshly filled sandwiches that will rotate weekly, from honey roasted ham and Gruyere to devilled egg mayo and roast beef with watercress. Along with fifteen toasties that rotate weekly, including taleggio with ham and spring onion, Bombay aloo and cheddar, goat's cheese with sweet chutney and beetroot, and bolognese with parmesan. Customers have asked us for salads all year round, so that is what we have done - six chopped salads rotating weekly, including puy lentil and feta, butternut squash and black bean, and beetroot and goat's cheese. Fresh, nourishing, and nothing sad about them.

There is a soup of the week, ten varieties rotating through the months, served with sourdough and butter. There is a hot dish of the week - beef curry, chicken and vegetable stew, potato dhal, bean and vegetable ragu, amongst others - served with sourdough. There are empanadas, handmade with fillings like butternut squash and goat's cheese or beef and corn. There are samosas. And there is a cajun chicken bap with lemon and pepper mayo that I am particularly pleased about.

Every one of these dishes is made with real ingredients. You can read the label or ask our team, and you can feel good about eating it. That is not a complicated proposition, but it is remarkable how rare it has become. So much of what passes for lunch in this country is assembled from things that have been manufactured to last on a shelf rather than nourish the person eating them. We wanted to offer something different. Something honest.

I realise that sounds like a large claim for a sandwich, but I don't think it is. The choices we make about what we eat every day matter enormously, and lunch is not a trivial meal. It is the thing that carries you through the afternoon, that gives you energy or takes it away, that can be a moment of genuine pleasure in the middle of a busy day or yet another disappointing compromise. Lunch doesn't have to be dull and unhealthy. I think we've shown that with this range.

We don't always get it right, I know, but we are trying to get it right. This new range is the result of months of work by our team, and I am proud of what they have put together. I hope you will come in, have a look, and tell us what you think. Your feedback matters to us; it always has and we will keep listening.

See you at Honesty.