All of a sudden, it seems like anywhere you go in Manhattan you’ll find a panini peddler. Every independent cafe serves it and, furthermore, they all have the same panini picture taped near the entrance. How did this happen? Did some global conglomerate decide to give free panini pressing machines to everybody? It reminds me of when gyros became popular in the early '80s. It may have been earlier, but I was just a kid. Every food place had the same picture of a women holding a gyro taped near the front.
::silent approach of black helicopters::
RUN DAMN YOU! RUN!
What’s panini? I’m serious, I don’t know what it is. Did I miss something?
Stick a sandwich in a George Foreman grill and you get a panini.
Yeah, what smack fu said. It’s basically a pressed and grilled sandwich. By no means a novel concept, which contributes to my curiosity even further.
‘panino’ is Italian for ‘sandwich’. ‘panini’ is italian for ‘two sandwiches’.
i suppose that Manhattan has decided that that Italy is in style, while at the same time Italy has just noticed that the 80’s are in style. vicious cycle 
A George Foreman grill would be a good substitute (especially when you’re an undergrad and you can swipe bread, cheese, and cold cuts from the school cafeteria…).
I’ve been able to get a panini somewhere local to me (in a few different cities) for a while, at least 8 years. Everyone must be catching on that they’re super tasty. I always liked to squish my sandwiches down when I was a kid anyway.
I couldn’t find a reference but isn’t there a big annual food supplier industry showcase and conference type thing? I would guess that panini was the hot product at the last one and that’s why we’re seeing them everywhere. But that’s just a guess…
Always throws me for a loop. “I can buy the famous tenth century Indian linguist who studied phonology and regularized the Sanskrit writing system? Ooh, I can buy him with tomatoes and pesto!”
They usually taste pretty good, though.
They’re just hitting New York now? They’ve been all over Montreal for a few years now. They were the trend for a while, with fillings getting as outlandish as eggplant and goat cheese (don’t knock it, it’s actually pretty darn good).
I guess we got sick of them and sent them south for the Americans to enjoy. Like we did with the Macarena. 
Hey, what’s going to be the next incarnation of the lowly sandwich so I can jump on the fad and make a killing. :rolleyes:
We’re not talking about the Breville Toastie here are we???
:rolleyes: Welcome to the 1980s New York!
I always think of the cool sticker-collecting books from the 80’s…never did finish that He-Man one…
My experience of Panini’s over here (UK) is that they are much flatter than a simple grilled sandwich, and the bread is different as well…although I’m not sure of it’s name…possibly Focaccia?
I’m pretty sure they’ve been around for a while. It’s just that EVERY cafe-type establishment now has them, and the same damn picture out front.
I wouldn’t know, but it happened here 6-7 years ago or so. I never had heard about/seen a panini in my life, and within less than one year they were sold everywhere. I was puzzled too.
Why the @%$ didn’t I think of that? I’ve been making sandwiches every day for a couple weeks, and I have a Foreman grill, and it never occurred to me to toast it like that. I am actually ashamed, and sad over the sandwiches I made that could have been toasted.
“Panino” is the Italian vernacular for this particular type of sandwich. It is the literal diminutive for “bread” so is a little like saying something like “little bread” or “breadlet”. “Panini” is not two, but it is plural. The word also became humorous and somewhat condescending slang for a type of teenage boy who eats this type of sandwich.
You can get panini all over the place in Italy, it’s kind of a street-corner phenomenon.
I can even get them at the local Giant food store now.
Good lord…we were making these things thirty years ago when I was a kid, only we did it with a special long-handled utensil over a campfire and called them “mountain pies”. If I only knew I had the beginnings of a profitable fad on my hands!
Panini has been slowly getting more mainstream for at least 15 years now. I’m suprised that you haven’t noticed it before. I think you’ve seen it before and just haven’t noticed it until recently when it reached a critical point where it rose above the noise floor of all the other food trends.