The delicious. 50 under $50 is spotlighting some of the city’s best value eats in Australia, and one of the biggest trends it has identified is the takeover of the high-end sandwich.

Granted, it doesn’t sound spectacularly satisfying, but we’re talking something more upmarket than the peanut butter numbers your mum used to pack for your lunchbox.

Out of all these fancy sangas, the tuna melt reigns supreme. The retro favourite has become a surprise hit in recent months and the revival is going strong.

The tuna melt has long been a popular sandwich choice in the US, particularly in the 1960s where, in its simplest form, it consisted of just tinned tuna and cheese.

However, that’s not exactly how they’re making it at A.P Town or Kosta’s Takeaway, where you can find two of the best tuna toasties in town.

A.P Bakery head baker, Dougal Muffet, says the tuna melt with tuna, mayonnaise, celery, pickles, onion and cheddar on A.P fermented potato bread is a popular order.

“I’ll take no credit for that one. Mat Lindsay (head chef at Poly and Ester) and one of his head chefs, Jess, did that. Jess is a bit of a tuna melt specialist and one of the big things Mat wanted was the bread had to be soft. It’s the fundamental basis for it,” Muffet says.

“It’s a fermented potato ciabatta that looks amazingly gnarly, crusty and dark but it’s the softest thing – like a cloud. The filling couldn’t be too oozy but had to have a bit of spice, had to have some pickles, had to have the fat ratio with a good combo of cheeses in there and celery for crunch.”

Muffet may be biased, but he believes a good sandwich should always start with the bread. “It has to be tasty, it has to form some kind of functionality and it has to be structural,” he says.

“In 99 per cent of sandwiches, the bread isn’t meeting the needs of a sandwich. There has to be a marriage of textures between the casing and the filling. There needs to be a synergy between the two and also be practical to eat.”

Muffet is impressed with the sandwich options available at the moment, nominating Good Ways Deli and Small’s Deli in Sydney and Hector’s Deli in Melbourne, as prime examples.

As well as being tasty, satisfying and convenient, he puts the appeal down to nostalgia.

“The options are endless in what it could potentially be, so you never get bored,” he says. “I feel like opening a sandwich shop 10 years ago would’ve been a weird idea, but right now it’s definitely not.”

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