The King of Club Sandwiches: His Top 12 Worldwide
Plus: a Montauk restaurant bait-and-switch, AI homeschooling anxiety, the Goodtime Hotel collapse, Maison Close’s Hamptons return, Jimmy Buffett’s estate fight and more...
Free letter today, because there hasn’t been one of those in a while, right? And you’re in for a treat. Zach Weiss has made a list of the best club sandwiches from around the world. And he knows club sandwiches—he’s made a point of trying them no matter where he goes. At this point, he’s become the unofficial (or perhaps, now, the official) King of the Club Sandwich.
If you’re a vegetarian or a club-hater, feel free to scroll down to the bottom. Today, we’ve also got a Montauk restaurant bait-and-switch, AI homeschooling anxiety, the Goodtime Hotel collapse, a Tom Wolfe book is headed for the small screen, Maison Close’s Hamptons return, Jimmy Buffett’s estate fight, and OpenAI’s reported TBPN deal—and what it says about affluential audiences…
At some point you notice the club sandwich is always there. It’s on the room service menu, it’s on the country club menu, it’s on the diner menu, and it looks almost exactly the same in all three places. It can cost $5 or $50 and no one blinks. It likely dates back to the Union Club or Saratoga Clubhouse in the 19th-century, and has never really been reworked, which is part of the appeal. You can tell a lot about a place by how seriously it takes a club sandwich.
I met Zach Weiss, who makes whatever room he’s in more fun, when he was still in college, coming into the city for events, and more than a decade later he’s not just attending them. He’s a fixture. At Ralph Lauren fashion shows, at Pharrell’s Met Gala after-party, at the St. Regis Aspen Snow Polo World Championship. He’s developed a reputation for a few very specific things (vintage tie shopping, hosting, knowing how to take a proper photo) but one of the most idiosyncratic that people go to him for is the club sandwich. Friends text him from hotel rooms, YOLO Journal and Town & Country have both called on him for it. At this point, it has stopped being a bit, and it has become a lane.
The list isn’t fixed—there’s no true number one or last place. But for anyone who travels the way he does, or finds themselves ordering a club more often than they expected to, this is the kind of list you keep in your back pocket.
Rich People Shit: Describe why you’re such a club sandwich connoisseur and why everyone asks for your advice on them.
Zach Weiss: I have no idea how I landed myself in this bizarre role of club sandwich savant (or perhaps snob is a better word?), but I certainly have the waistline and room service receipts to prove it. I think it happened somewhere along the line when I would go on these intense travel tears for weeks, and after getting burnt out on local food, I’d always look for something comforting whether it was in Europe, Asia, or the Middle East. Eventually, it just became a case of me succumbing to friends in my Instagram DMs asking: “Need club sandwich content.” Of course I obliged, and eventually made a pair of shoes with the club sandwich on them when I had a collaboration with the slipper brand Stubbs & Wootton.
RPS: What makes the perfect club sandwich?
ZW: I think the elements of a club sandwich have everything to do with your surroundings. If you’re in a fancy hotel, you expect the club sandwich to be precise in its elements and structurally sound. If you’re at a diner or deli, you expect it to be overflowing with turkey and mayonnaise and probably a pickle on the side. I recently weighed in on this in a story for Town & Country, and was surprised at the comments from people who really haven’t experienced good and called out several club sandwiches that I know for a fact don’t belong in the ranks for many reasons including… yellow cheddar cheese, ham, a fully warmed sandwiched (who wants hot lettuce?!), too much bacon, resting on the laurels of the fries on the side vs. the sandwich itself, the list goes on and on and on.
RPS: Why a club?
ZW: There’s something so comforting about it, and the fact that it’s available almost anywhere in the world means it can operate under this guise of being an elevated treat rather than what it really is: the slightly more jet set version of a Happy Meal.
Zach Weiss’ Top 10 12 Club Sandwiches From Around the World
This is almost impossible for me to rank, and I have no doubt these will change over the years as I experience more…
1. Le Sirenuse in Positano, Italy
Beautifully built, and accompanied with a bright, fresh tomato salad in the center for just the right touch of local influence.
2. The Kulm Hotel in St. Moritz, Switzerland
Feels slightly caught in time from an era where mayonnaise was a food group. I love it, especially when it’s so cold and you need something hearty. It’s also available on the hotel’s 24-hour menu.
3. Le Bristol in Paris, France
I love the summer version of their club that comes dressed with lobster rather than chicken. The price is eye-watering, but even the tried and true version is a treat and best enjoyed in the hotel’s center garden. (Tip: If you’d like to experience a lobster club with a much lower price tag, there’s a chain in Paris called Homer that serves a lobster club. It’s not nearly as good, but comes in at just about $30)
4. La Mamounia in Marrakech, Morocco
The last place I would expect to find such a precise club, but it’s presented in this totally symmetrical format that I find mesmerizing, photogenic, and of course tasty.
5. William Poll Deli in New York, New York
I love everything about William Poll and I’m so scared it’s going to go away one day, but in addition to the soups and dips and meatloaf, their turkey club is a nice little treat to have any day of the week except Sunday’s when they’re closed. They also don’t really do merch, but if you ask nicely you can buy a hat!
6. The Hotel du Cap Eden Roc in Cap d’Antibes, France
This hits all of the right notes for a beautifully executed hotel club sandwich, but it’s made even better after you’ve had a jump in the hotel’s pool or, even better, the salty Med.
7. Bobby’s Airway Grill in Dallas, Texas
A mix of a hotel club and a diner club, with the pickles right in the middle of the sandwich. A totally unexpected find.
8. The American Hotel in Sag Harbor, New York
Feels like your grandmother made it. The sides you can select from include coleslaw and potato salad, so it really feels like you’re at a great backyard barbecue.
9. Villa d’Este in Cernobbio, Italy
A hideaway for many American holiday makers in Lake Como, this is the best executed version of the club sandwich I’ve found in Italy. Many others make the error of building their club in the style of the Italian tramezzini, which a club sandwich certainly is not.
10. Edith’s in New York, NY
Their schnitzel club isn’t a true club sandwich, but it deserves a spot on this list for the simple fact that each and every ingredient feels fresh and thoughtful, starting with the beautifully thick-yet-soft bread. It’s a commitment of sandwich though, given the schnitzel, so I usually recommend splitting it with a friend.
11. Clark St Diner in Los Angeles, California
A very California-style iteration served in a midcentury diner on nice wheat bread and a generous portion of fresh avocado.
12. Donohue’s in New York, NY
Donohue’s feels untouched from when it opened in 1950, and this club sandwich always comes with a show. It’s best ordered at the bar from the longstanding Irish barman named Johnny. Make sure to order it as a “junior club” so they remove the center slice of bread, and choose coleslaw as your side. Not fries. You’re guaranteed to make a friend at the bar, usually one of the regulars, who will always have a tale to share, and the Donohue’s club is just the right snack to go along with it.
Honorable Mention: The McClub
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but a sleeper hit we discovered during a recent visit to Vienna was that some of the McDonald’s locations offer a “McClub.” It is by no means actually a substitute for a proper club sandwich, but at $5, why not give it a try?
In today’s letter: AI homeschooling anxiety, the Goodtime Hotel collapse, Maison Close’s Hamptons return, a Montauk restaurant bait-and-switch, The Bonfire of the Vanities gets a series adaption, Jimmy Buffett’s estate fight, and OpenAI’s reported TBPN deal—and what it says about affluential audiences….
Apple is developing a series adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, with David E. Kelley writing and Matt Reeves directing, taking another swing at one of New York’s most famous rich-people meltdown stories. Good or bad, I will be watching.
Frightening article in Town & Country. Wealthy parents are pulling their kids out of traditional schools and into AI-powered homeschooling or small, custom setups because they don’t think the standard system holds up anymore. If AI is already coming for entry-level jobs, the move is to skip the grades-to-college pipeline and train your kid for something else entirely. Where is this all headed?
The Goodtime Hotel, the Pharrell Williams–backed South Beach project, just laid off all 126 employees after its operator exited, with a foreclosure battle already underway. When it opened in April 2021 with a full Pharrell-and-friends rollout, it was the talk-of-the-town in Miami.
Let’s try this again…Maison Close, the Paris cabaret-style Soho restaurant, will return to the Hamptons this summer after its initial Montauk outpost burned down the night before its Memorial Day 2023 debut. It won’t be in the same spot though (bad luck?); they’re reopening at the Capri in Southampton this June.
Also making waves out East: A new Montauk restaurant, Este, was approved as a relatively low-key spot, but neighbors got hold of an investor deck showing a 455-person capacity and DJ setup at night, suggesting it was sold to the town as dinner and to investors as something much closer to Surf Lodge. Uh oh….
Jimmy Buffett’s $275 million estate fight is now heading to a Florida appeals court in West Palm Beach, where his widow is challenging co-trustee Richard Mozenter, a financial adviser who has been using trust money to pay his own legal fees while battling her for control. Her argument is he shouldn’t be able to use the same pot of money to fight against her. Am I missing something? How is he allowed to do this?
If you work in media or tech, the thing you’ve probably been talking about for the past twenty-four hours is that OpenAI reportedly bought TBPN, the Silicon Valley livestream/podcast that treats tech like a sport, in a deal said to be in the “low hundreds of millions.” The exact number hasn’t been given, but at that level it could approach—or even surpass—The Joe Rogan Experience, which has held the record for the most expensive podcast deal. Not sure we’ll ever know. What makes this so notable is that TBPN has only been around for about two and a half years, and has a relatively small subscriber base (around 58K on YouTube, if I’m getting my numbers right). It’s a perfect example of what corp dev execs have been telling me when it comes to media: it’s not necessarily the size of your audience, but the size of their wallets. They don’t want aspirational anymore, they want affluential. And who is more affluential than the Silicon Valley set that listens to TBPN?
As for their buyer, OpenAI, well, call it less a media acquisition and more a messaging one: instead of chasing coverage, they now own the show everyone in tech already watches.
If you or someone you know is an expert in something that feels very RPS, let’s talk: carson@readrps.com. And if you don’t yet follow @readrps on Instagram, now is the time to start.
Needed this!! Thank you Carson and Zach <3
Thank you Team RPS! 🥪🥪🥪