Sometimes you just want to eat a sandwich, but it seems like the city is hiding all the sandwiches behind other food options like burritos and dumplings. We highlight the best places to buy deliciousness stuffed between slices of bread.

There are a few years after finishing school when sandwiches are best left alone – allowing for time to cleanse the memory of soggy white bread broken apart by hastily applied peanut butter and left to fester in a lunch box for hours.

Once that time has passed, you can return to this particular lunch-time foodstuff with enthusiasm. Here, we take you through the best purveyors of things sandwiched between bread – right from the cheap and cheerful end of the spectrum to the fancy French side.

Plaza Takeaway Food
Shop 9, Topham Mall, Adelaide
Double cut salad roll – $8.70

There’s nothing like a double cut salad roll – the smearing of margarine on the bottom side, the salt and pepper that is pre-mixed in the shaker, the application of mayonnaise with what appears to be an old palette knife – all these things add to the singular flavour of this snack-bar specialty.

CityMag’s favourite place for a salad roll is Topham Mall’s Plaza Takeaway. Run by nice people who seem non-judgemental about our lack of decisiveness on the pickle issue (sometimes “yes”, sometimes “no”), it’s an efficient place that has all the right fillings to choose from and fresh bread – which is clearly the most important thing.

Market St
11 Market Street, Adelaide
Salami baguette – $11.50

The new player in the Gouger Street neighbourhood is already showing strong skills in the sandwich game. Alongside their display cabinet full of ridiculously attractive baked goods, there is an equally excellent baguette selection.

With bread baked on-site, the sandwich casing is undeniably fresh – but the fillings when we visited were equally impressive. From a range of gourmet options we chose the salami baguette which was filled with pesto, sundried tomato, provolone, salami and baby spinach. Most lovable (and surprising) of all – it came with a little side of pickled/curried vegetables which were super delicious and exciting because lunch never comes with sides.

The Exeter
246 Rundle Street, Adelaide
Steak sandwich – $9.90
(With bottle of Krug – $308.90)

We at CityMag have known about The Exeter’s steak sandwich for years and are eternally perplexed that the place isn’t over-run each lunch-time with punters scrabbling for this far-too-reasonably-priced menu item. It’s a classic steak sandwich arrangement – minute steak on some solid toasted bread with caramelised onion, lettuce and tomato. Perhaps most exciting, the under-$10 price tag also includes a side of chips and tomato sauce.

Standard lunch-time wisdom will tell you a schooner of Coopers Pale Ale would be a nice accompaniment to the steak sandwich, but if you’re feeling particularly fancy/ have just gotten married/had a baby/experienced other life changing events/have more money than you know what to do with – The Exeter is one of the more affordable stockists of Krug. And apparently, “there’s champagne and then there’s Krug” so it might be worth a try.

Hey Jupiter
11 Ebenezer Place, Adelaide
Smoked salmon sandwich – $13.50 OR Pork Belly sandwich – $14

Hey Jupiter’s sandwiches are so good that CityMag hesitates to call them sandwiches. They are also so good we couldn’t choose between two menu items. The most popular menu item by far is the pork belly sandwich, which features a celeriac and apple remoulade, parsley and heaps of roast pork belly. We switch between this choice and the smoked salmon – which is served with avocado, toasted sesame seeds, red onion, wasabi mayonnaise and smoked salmon.

Clearly, this is a different ballpark to your salad sandwich – but even with all those complex and grown-up flavours in there, the Hey Jupiter range still have that familiar comforting feeling all sandwiches should.