Sesame, Leeds

I was confident there’d be somewhere good to grab lunch up at the financial/legal/office end of town. Surely those hungry workers couldn’t all be satisfied with Tesco Express or Starbucks. It was starting to look that way until I chanced upon Sesame.

It's a little corner café and takeaway just off Park Square, the focus is on sushi, salads and noodle soups but I spotted there was a Friday special - a fishfinger sandwich for £3.

It was £3 well spent, a very good sandwich. I don’t think the fishfingers were home-made, but they were a cut above the average frozen effort, the crumb crispier, the fillet chunkier. There were also a generous three of them in there.

Combined with decent tartare sauce, salad and very good bread and you’ve got an excellent sarnie. It’s funny how you often don’t much notice the bread when eating sandwiches. Bad bread, cheap and nasty or stale stands out a mile, but average bread just passes me by as I home in on the fillings. It’s that average bread that tends to be the norm, so when you eat a sandwich made with genuinely good, well-made bread you suddenly realise what you’ve been missing. I do anyway.

I chose granary but rather than the open textured slightly dry stuff you might expect this was closer textured, slightly chewy and with a lightly glazed crust and a delicious mild, yeasty flavour. A proper sub roll I guess you’d call it, reminiscent of the rolls used for the sausage butties at the excellent Barbakan Deli over the hills in Chorlton.

The bread at Sesame was advertised as being from Thierry Dumouchel, a French baker and patissier based in Garforth. I’ve heard of him before but this was the first time I’ve sampled his bread. A trip to Garforth beckons.

Service was quick and friendly, even though they were very busy. Great stuff. I'll be back to give the noodle soups and sushi a try.

8/10

18 St Paul’s Street
Leeds
LS1 2LE

http://www.ilovesesame.co.uk/