Panini

A Polish café sells a panini from a glass case: a clerk lifts one out, lays it on a ridged contact grill, and brings the lid down for a minute or two. The bread is a ciabatta-style roll or a flat loaf split through the middle, filled with ham and a cheese that melts, sometimes with tomato slices, a smear of pesto or grilled chicken. The top plate squashes the loaf to about two thirds of its height, scores the crust with dark stripes, and drives heat to the middle so the cheese is moving by the time the clerk slides the sandwich into a paper sleeve and hands it across.

The paper fogs almost at once. The crust is dry, brittle and slightly oily, and it crackles where the ridges bit in. Steam off the ham and cheese smells of warm wheat and salt, and the cheese at the edge is hot enough to scald the roof of the mouth, so the safer first bite is from the middle. A tomato slice leaks juice into the crumb, which goes soft and almost custardy against the crisp underside. Ciabatta, with its big open holes, takes the compression and springs back a little; a soft toast-style loaf collapses under the same lid to a dense grey slab, and that is the commonest bad panini in a chain case.

Most of the other failures happen at the press. Pulled too early, the bread is pale, the cheese is still in slices and the ham is cold. Left too long, the ridges char, fat from the ham weeps out and fries onto the plate, and the crust turns hard enough to cut. An overfilled one stops the lid from closing, so the top slumps and the filling leaks out the sides. Chains that assemble the day's paninis in the morning and hold them in a chilled case hand the grill a harder job, since cold cheese in the middle of cold bread heats last. One built fresh, with the cheese laid against the bread, melts cleanly.

The counter decides who buys it. In the chain cafés the panini sits beside the muffins and the coffee machine, usually in a run of three or four fillings, and it sells to commuters who want something closed, hand-held and wrapped, at café prices. On petrol-station food counters it shares the heated shelf with hot dogs and pastries. Poland's own hot street sandwich, the zapiekanka, is a split baguette baked open under mushrooms, cheese and ketchup, which needs an oven and no lid, and it was feeding commuters from street hatches long before the café chains arrived.

The fillings follow the chain menu more than any Italian habit. Ham and cheese is the base, and mozzarella is the common word on the label, though the melting component is as likely to be a mild yellow cheese from a Polish dairy. Chicken with pesto, mozzarella with tomato and basil, and a vegetarian build of grilled courgette and peppers fill out the case. The soft, crustless Italian tramezzino turns up in some of the same cases, cold and cut into triangles. Because the filling list is short and nearly identical from chain to chain, the press does most of the work, and a tired grill with burnt-on cheese in its ridges shows on every sandwich it closes on.

Origin and history

The sandwich came out of Milan's bars, the paninoteche, where the hot pressed version took hold in the 1960s and 1970s (sources vary on the decade), and it spread through Europe and North America with café culture. No Polish history of it gives an introduction date, a first importer or a first menu, so its arrival can only be traced through the foreign-style coffee chains that sold it.

Those chains leave a dated trail. Coffeeheaven, a Polish-run chain formed in 1999, opened its first café in Gdynia in 2000, and its published product line paired coffee with sandwiches and panini. No surviving menu confirms panini at the Gdynia opening itself, so the safe reading is that the pressed ciabatta was in Polish cafés during the 2000s, with Coffeeheaven among the earliest named sellers. A Warsaw writer in the daily Rzeczpospolita later complained that she had met no real paninoteca in Poland and found proper tramezzini only at the Milano café on Koszykowa Street, one critic's verdict on how thin the Italian scene behind the clamp remained.

Costa Coffee lists Poland as an entry market in 2007, and in December 2009 it announced its purchase of Coffeeheaven. The deal put the Gdynia chain's cafés, with the coffee-and-panini line they had sold since the early 2000s, under a British brand.