I’ve been mentally composing a post with this title for more than a year now. Pret a Manger helped me through some desperately poor months in London, when I’d get a £1.50 egg-salad sandwich and go sit in the Tube station to eat it during my lunch break from The Economist (uh, The Economist bookshop, that is). So I was excited when Pret came to the States a couple of years ago, as I was still quite poor then too. But the U.S. managers managed to jack everything up.

First, it was the switch to inferior chutney in the “Coronation Chicken” sandwich. Then they stopped making that really good raspberry bar (they have one again now, but it sucks). Then it was their scaling back even farther on the mayo, even on sandwiches that needed it, like egg salad. Then it was the realization that all their slicey sandwich bread is really just hideous and gummy. Uck–then it was those weird images they started putting on the sandwich boxes–like those little baguettes with shoelaces drawn on them? What’s the point of that pointlessly whimsical exercise? There’s some weird text with it, but it makes no sense, so of course I forgot it. Especially lame, considering how bad the bread is.

But, but, but… Every time I was about to chuck out little PaM just like a lover who crossed the pond and then turned out to be not so great on my home turf, something reeled me back in. First, of course, is location–one above-ground just outside the Time-Life building, and another down in the bowels of Rock Center…and that one gives you a discount if you have a Rock Center tenant ID.

Then they redid the place with that groovy wallpaper. And I discovered their breakfast pastries–well, really only the pain au chocolat–were pretty good. And their baguette sandwiches are a big improvement on the sliced-bread sammies, as long as you can block out the image that you might actually be eating shoes.

When I was just in Heathrow, I went to the Pret a Manger there and surveyed the offerings. Many of the sandwiches were marked “low mayo.” So I guess it’s a global problem, this mayo-loathing. I couldn’t hold it against them. And they had bags of parsnip chips. They were fantastically sweet and delicious. But of course they’ll never sell them here in the States, because people get turnips and parsnips mixed up, and parsnips smell like pee when you boil them anyway.

Then, the clincher: I stopped in the other morning for a pain au chocolat (at the aboveground store, on 50th St.), and the new manager personally welcomed me. I’d normally think that was lame and smarmy, but the new manager was hot, all with a Latino accent, a silky ponytail, Euro-look square glasses, and very, very intense eye contact. He had on a groovy shirt too, which kind of went with the wallpaper. He looked as though he’d been beamed from some lefty-bohemian coffee shop in Mexico City or Buenos Aires–a lefty-bohemian coffee shop that Believed in The Revolution, but didn’t take itself too seriously, really–straight to Pret a Manger. And he looked happy about it.

If this is PaM’s latest attempt to pander to the American consumer, I’m buying. But if he gets fired, then, really, that’s it, for the last time: dead to me.