At £9.95 the steak ciabatta on the new menu at the Ship & Trades could be Medway’s most expensive sandwich. But is it worth it? I went along on a sunny afternoon last week to find out.

While I sampled the steak sarnie, my dining companion had crab and crayfish – another of the pub’s speciality sandwiches, this one coming in slightly cheaper at £9.50.

They have both been added to the Ship & Trades’ re-launched menu following a £1.2m million makeover and extension.

Our first impressions were good.

The sandwiches were served on trendy tray-plates with little metal pots of sweet potato fries.

But when I tucked in, I found the steak, although quite tasty, was chewy.

The crab and crayfish was stuffed inside the ciabatta, so you got plenty, but seemed to be a bit lacking in flavour.

The sweet potato fries were good and the little pot of tomato salsa that came with the steak was nice. But the problem was, the food is above average in price, but wasn’t really above average in taste.

I’m struggling to find words more enthusiastic than ‘quite tasty’, ‘good’ and ‘nice’.

On paper, the new menu is quite impressive – with lobster, wild boar sausages and Japanese-style salmon.

But there wasn’t really anything wrong with the old menu, which had fish finger or Spitfire sausage sandwiches, on a par with what we had this time but a few quid cheaper.

The boss of Shepherd Neame Jonathan Neame, below, recently said, when explaining why the firm was selling off some pubs and investing in others, that its strategy is now about quality over quantity. He said people won’t pay for mediocre anymore.

But unfortunately, mediocre is exactly what we got at Ship & Trades. The food wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t exceptional either.

A few weeks ago I had a lobster roll and chips in Whitstable.

It cost £14 – more than my lunch at the Ship & Trades but it was packed with flavour and I was in a great location on the harbour front, so you are quite happy to pay a bit more.