Pret's vegan brownie and mac and cheese: Are they any good?

If you're a vegan in London, or just a vegan with a Twitter feed that has any London vegans on it, then you'll have seen the news a few weeks ago that the sandwich chain Pret was opening a second all-veggie branch. 

The first meat-free Pret branch opened last year and was meant to be a short-term pop-up. It turned out to be so popular with the local flesh-dodgers that it became a permanent fixture in Soho after its planned summer stint ended. While the shop is veggie, not vegan, there are still a goodly number of foods for the plant-based - you can read about what they were offering when I visited here.

Not only were people high-fiving the second Pret branch because it means more people ditching meat, they were also high-fiving because it seemed the sarnie chain is becoming a bit of cheerleader for vegan options too: the company said that it was adding 20 new veg*n options to its menu "including a vegan Macaroni Cheese – which has taken our team the best part of a year to perfect – and a vegan chocolate brownie".

The second branch is on Great Eastern Street in Shoreditch (it was chosen as the location for the second veggie Pret "based on the high levels of vegetarian sales in the area", apparently). In a happy coincidence, I had to be in Shoreditch for work on its opening day and tried to stop in.

Only I couldn't.

I pretty much couldn't get in the door, because there were so many people jammed inside, picking up all the veggie and vegan goodness. There was even one of those ropes usually seen at nightclubs in the movies, only this one (in veggie green, of course) was being used to steer the queues that were building up outside. I had to admit defeat, and leave without either the brownie or the mac and cheese.

Happily, I had a reason to go back to Shoreditch a couple of weeks later and, equally happily, the volume of people trying to get in had fallen back a bit (don't get me wrong, it was still busy, but at least I could get in the door). Clearly, there were only two things I was grabbing for lunch.

The mac and cheese you can see above. I didn't have massively high hopes - readymade mac and cheese always seems to overpromise and underdeliver. 

You can pick up the Pret mac and cheese from the hot cabinet, where the pasta's been jazzed up a bit with the addition of kale, dinky cherry tomatoes and some breadcrumbs on top.

So what was the verdict? Was it worth the return visit? Yeah, to be honest, it was pretty respectable - there's a lovely, understated cheesiness, and the sauce is just as creamy and smooth as you'd hope. The extra veggies are also a fine idea - the sharpness of the tomatoes is a good way to cut through the richness of the sauce. Being a student, spending money on sandwich-shop lunches when I could stick something between two slices of bread and save myself a fiver isn't something I'll be doing often, but I'm glad that there's vegan mac and cheese on the high street. More please!

The brownie? Yeah, that's good. But you knew that already. How wrong is a vegan brownie with salted caramel sauce oozing out the middle ever going to be? Again, I was pretty impressed with Pret's vegan work. They've really made strides in high street vegan food. Let's hope there's a veggie Pret (complete with vegan brownies) coming to a London borough - or non-London town - near you soon.