‘My strength is making a good sandwich’
Will Hobson, co-owner of Arthur’s Mini Super, on doing what you’re good at (and love)
“This is an adaptation of the tuna melt,” says Will Hobson as he brings the portioned-out ingredients from the kitchen into the courtyard at the back of Arthur’s Mini Super, a wildly popular and much loved eatery in Sea Point, Cape Town.
In contrast to the tuna melt – and tuna mayo – on the menu, there will be no tomato but there will be dill. There’ll also be capers, red onion and feta. “We’re in the process of probably changing this one because I think this is better, but probably more expensive. But we think about that second. Let’s not get bogged down with the money.”
When it comes to making sandwiches, one might describe Will’s approach as maximalist, whereas Stephanie Anastasopoulos, his partner in the business, prefers a pared down “hero-ing of the ingredients.” For her, “the ingredients are all that matters,” Will says.
A Will item is likely to be one of the “crazy big, sort of diner style, dip-in sandwiches with tons of sauce”, while a Steph item would be butter, capers, anchovies and lemon rind, compounded and spread on a piece of toast. “And that marriage between the two of us is why our menu is how it is, and it’s quite extensive for such a small place.”
Arthur’s Mini Super started out as an upmarket neighbourhood deli, selling breads, cured meats and cheeses sourced from farms, markets and other artisanal suppliers. “We became a little bit busier but it was kind of not really going anywhere with just making coffee.”
With the deli items approaching their best before dates, Will and Steph started making fresh sandwiches with them. “Then we were, like, let’s introduce a toastie because it is quite difficult, weirdly, to find a good toastie anywhere.”
Steph does a lot of the sourcing from a variety of local producers, which includes “literally the most expensive eggs you can buy in Cape Town,” Will says, referring to Eggcellent Eggs, an Overberg farm operation where the pasture-raised chickens not only run free, but are serenaded regularly.
Will and Steph could be getting their free-range eggs from a bulk supplier for less than a rand an egg. But they pay R5.20 an egg – such is the importance to them of the highest quality raw ingredients – and they go through 1500 eggs a week.
The sandwiches Will makes most often for himself is this tuna number he’s putting together right now, and the pizza toast (cheese and tomato with anchovies). The pizza toast was “a formative moment” prompted by “two sweet, old ladies” who came in and described a dish they ate frequently as kids. Sure, Will had said; we can make that. Then the Arthur’s team made one to taste and decided it should have a little less anchovy. What would make it more pizza-like would be a bit of good Greek oregano, so they added that.
While no other item on the menu was inspired by customers, that’s not because they don’t get “a helluva lot of suggestions.”
“I think I have quite a good way of pretending that I’m going to take on the suggestion. I’ll kind of accept it for a while and go, like, ja, cool, ja, sounds good, ja. And then they’ll be, and also you should do this. And then I’ll say, oh, is that what you do at your restaurant? And then they’ll say, oh no, I don’t have a restaurant. And then I just go, oh . . . okay.
“My most irritating thing that I find, though, is when people will make up their own thing and then complain about it afterwards, to me, as if it’s something I’ve made for them. And when people just won’t accept that there’s no avocado.
“We don’t have it when it’s deeply out of season. And they’re always, like, that place down the road has avos and there’s avos at Woolies. I’m just, like, cool. They’ve come from, like, you know, the equator, and half of them are shit. And you can just eat something else for once. You don’t have to eat avo every day. And then when it’s avo season, people are not that interested in avos; they’re all avo’d out.”
Will grew up in Johannesburg with a mother who actively involved him and his brother in family meal prep. So it’s no surprise that his brother is also a dab hand in the kitchen although he didn’t go into it professionally, taking over their father’s labour brokerage instead. His brother always orders the ham and cheese toastie at Arthur’s.
Despite having a six year-old daughter and a three year-old son, Will seldom gets sandwich orders at home because “they just want to eat chicken nuggets and butter pasta”.
“I don’t really know why that is the case because they’ve had such hectic exposure to amazing food and spice. My wife and I are both very into food and cooking – my wife’s a very, very good cook as well.”
His wife’s name is Grace. “We can’t stand each other but we’ve just said we can’t let go of that cool combination, so we’ve stuck together. I mean, Will and Grace; can’t let that go. Our friends Dharma and Greg are the same.”
Will fell into professional sandwich making when he was managing Field Office, South African design duo Pedersen + Lennard’s furniture showroom and cafe. They were selling hundreds of coffees a day there but there was no food, so Will started doing sandwiches. That turned into an office sandwich delivery business that operated out of his Woodstock home. But Grace wasn’t mad about that set-up so he rented a space and a dark kitchen, “before dark kitchens were a thing.”
At the same time, Will was cheffing at The Woodlands Eatery when Larry and Sarah Steenkamp owned it. Larry, like Will, is an untrained chef. When Larry stepped out of the kitchen, Will took over for two and a half years.
“A lot of the way I sort of run things is very much, like, echoes of Larry. He was a very hands-on owner and all the staff absolutely loved him. Very kind of larger than life.”
When Grace was offered a scholarship to study in Chicago, they moved there and Will got his second job in a restaurant kitchen: “It was a very high-end kitchen; you had to wear the chef jacket. And I had to get there at 7 in the morning and we only left at midnight. It was literally this basement under the restaurant, no natural light, very clinical. I worked two or three shifts there and it was hell.
“It was very competitive and, to be honest, horrible. They were very, sort of like movie chefs. Like, crazy guys. After shift they would drink, having been doing cocaine all day. They would drink at the bar till 4 in the morning and then get back to work at 7 in the morning. And just do that every day in this dark room. All young, tattooed Chicagoans.
“I worked two days and then on the third day they were, like, see you tomorrow, and I was, like, cool, see you tomorrow. And then on my bicycle ride home, I was just, like, there’s no fucking ways I’m doing that.”
Toastie tutorial with Will Hobson
“It’s important to do this for a minute before making a sandwich,” Will says, bopping side to side while clinking cutlery.
“You obviously need very good bread but I have had toasties on crappy bread that are delicious. Pain de mie is very good to toast. It’s an enriched white bread made with a little bit of olive oil. It always has a beautiful crust but is extremely soft and absorbs a lot of the greasiness of the toastie, which can be greasy.”
At Arthur’s, they butter the outside of the bread and put mayo on the inside. “It sort of double fries the bread because the mayo with the heat will unconstitute and then turn into oil again, which the bread absorbs. And the butter’s on the other side, so you can get a nice sort of soft, almost sweet, bread.
“The trick is if you just put the butter like this (he demonstrates not spreading it edge to edge), sure it’ll melt, but you’ll get a little weird brown circle. So if you want consistency of how the bread looks, and you eat with your eyes, you must make sure that the butter is touching every part of the bread. And as you can see, it’s quite a lot of butter.”
The mayo is made in-house from Eggcellent Eggs. At Arthur’s, the chilli sauce and pesto is made in-house, too, as well as all of the dipping sauces. The marinara sauce for the chicken parm is made from the ends of the tomatoes which they grate: “a waste product win”. In the winter, they loosen the sauce and turn it into tomato soup.
“For this toastie, we put a tiny bit of mayo on one side because there’s mayo going in here (he points to the filling mixture). On the unbuttered side of the bread in all of their toasties, mayo is spread edge to edge unless a customer specifies that they don’t want mayo. This is Steph’s trick: putting mayo on the inside slices of the bread. Since having the shop together, Will credits Steph with having had a big influence on him “in terms of how to make things”.
“This is also a very good quality chunk tinned tuna that we get from Mayfair. Again, we could get a cheaper one that might have little bits of dolphin in it but we don’t.”
“So take all of the ingredients and put them all together. This is also kind of trending at the moment,” Will says, as he begins to chop everything together in one clump.
“Chopped salads were big for a while. Now you’re getting these things called chopped sandwiches, but it’s more for fresh sandwiches. So they’ll chop up all the ingredients together and they’ll put it in a roll. I guess it’s that every bite is the same and also you can sneak things in and elevate things in a cost effective way. But, also, for busy prep, you could make quite easily a big batch of this whereas, currently, the tuna mayo and the tuna melt in our kitchen are made to order.
“It starts as quite a messy procedure,” he adds, noting that this is not how they do it in the kitchen at Arthur’s, “but it might start”.
“So already we know we need more mayo.”
“This is our sort of secret weapon: very good quality white cheddar from a place called Camphill. I think all toasted sandwiches should have white cheddar in some capacity. It’s nice and stringy, but not too stringy like mozzarella, and it has a really nice sort of sharpness. White cheddar also has one less process than yellow cheddar.
“And this is feta. This is a bit of a rogue move but I think it’s going to be nice. I think it’s just gonna elevate the saltiness because I’m not going to season it at all.” Herbamare is usually added as the seasoning.
“Then you shape it kind of like a slice of bread.”
“It’s a bit like pizza, I guess. The variation between exceptional pizza and shit pizza is huge. And it’s the same with toasties. It’s sort of an understanding of how all the ingredients are going to work together: the mayo and the butter, and the kind of cheese you use, all contribute to the good toastie.”
“Okay. This is ready for toasting,” says Will. On the right, toasted and ready for eating.
nothing like a great sandwich.....