GENEVA, SWITZERLAND / EDITOR’S NOTEPAD – The most curious thing about the Daily Mail’s club sandwich index article, which puts Geneva at the top of the list as the city with the most expensive club sandwiches in the world – is how or why the world’s hotels have all decided to offer their guests club sandwiches. The CSI, now in its second year and set up by UK-based Hotels.com, a travel advisory and reservations outfit, said last year, when it named Paris the ville la plus chère that “Paris may well be the gastronomic capital of the world but at an average £20.43 per Club, travellers may be better off sticking to a Croque-Monsieur…”
No kidding. And when in Geneva your average Brit might want to head to the bakery and buy a ham sandwich. That said, one of the best of the 10 or so club sandwiches of my life was at the Noga Hilton, but it was the french fries that pushed it to the top of my admittedly limited personal club quality list.
Back to the why: wikipedia says that club sandwiches are generally associated with hotels and sends us to whatscookingamerica for the history of the sandwich. And it seems that Wallis Simpson loved making them for her husband, England’s Edward VIII. The great, late American chef James Beard called it “one of the great sandwiches of all time” but deplored its various bastardizations.
Zurich second most expensive city for travelers, after the sandwich
Geneva doesn’t even make the cut with Trip Advisors new most expensive cities for travelers, reports the Sydney Morning Herald. Zurich does: it’s number two. Here’s how they measured it, “TripIndex Cities is based on the cost of a couple staying one night in a four-star hotel, cocktails, a two-course dinner with a bottle of wine, and return taxi fare of 3.2 kilometres each way.” Ha, so blame the taxi and walk to the closest restaurant in Zurich, where, it seems, you are not likely to find a club sandwich.