If I went in just once then probably something in the Ham & Cheese line - if I went in regularly I'd want a selection. Last Saturday Mrs INJ and I shared a Mushroom and Gorgonzola and a Tuna Melt.
[Phil] Generally, anything containing no cheese and not full of glop. Sweet Chilli Chicken, Ham and Piccalilli and Smoked Mackerel and Salad are the things I've had recently at a cafe I often go to for lunch at the weekend. The Ham (when they have it) is proper ham, of course, not vacuum-packed water-filled slices of reconstituted mechanically recovered meat. The Piccalilli might also have been homemade, not poured from a jar of clonmult.
Marvellous Raak. I love the "BECCLES (pl. n.) The small bone buttons placed in bacon sandwiches by unemployed guerrilla dentist." It reminds me of two things about my younger sister. She had a throry that you only get those buttons in bacon when there's a Labour government. She also had a lot of difficulty one weekend evening in the pub (many years ago, of course) when a handsome young man told he he was an 'armydentist'. She tried to fasten the two words together, like 'taxidermist', and couldn't understand what the job was. Re; panini ham'n'cheese is the default filling, but I'd also go for perhaps hot roast beef with wholegrain mustard, and the smoked mackerel sounds good too. Can you lift the lid afterwards to stuff some watercress in?
Some colleagues of mine had to go on a trip to Flums (a town somewhere in darkest Switzerland) recently. The name seemed horribly familiar for some reason, but I couldn't think why I might ever have heard of the place. Eventually I tracked it down to the Meaning of Liff. FLUMS: Women who only talk to each other at parties.
Interesting from the responses I've had so far, here and elsewhere, that no-one has suggested anything vaguely Italian (with the exception of funghi con gorgonzola).
[INJ] Now I think of it, the Smoked Mackerel one was an untoasted baguette, but the Sweet Chilli Chicken is a toasted panini, and includes some lettucey things and chopped gherkins.
[Phil] I suspect it's because the Italians would never take cheap bread and squish it between hot plates to make it palatable, let alone consider it a delicacy. It's a rather recent lunch-comestible-vendor's invention.
[pen] I used to get my lunchtime panino/i in a food court in Dublin, cooked by Italians. They had a choice of 4 each day, and were various combinations of parma ham, bresaola, aubergine, olives, mozzarella, basil, pesto, sundried tomato etc. Always delicious, and great with a large espresso.
[Phil] If I was feeling mean, I'd point out that you may have just described immigrants selling a bastardised version of what Dubliners might consider foreign food. But I'm not. I'm just hungry. It's the last of the proper British pork chops tonight (ie more than 4mm thick), when the windy miller finally gets home.
Anything that doesn't involve potatoes and/or coleslaw counts as foreign food in Ireland :-) The reason I asked in the first place is that I have a "Panini Grill" which does great toasted sandwiches, but I want to take advantage of the lunchtime panini market. My personal preference for fillings seems to be miles away from what other people want/expect, for which information I'm very grateful.
[Phil] I'd suggest going round a few of your local coffee shops just before lunch time and see what they have most of on their shelves. You can be sure they've done the research. The only difference about your trade is that you could probably go a little dryer and saltier. Mind you this definitely sounds like 'teaching your grandmother'.
[INJ] This assumes that supply = demand. There are at least two canteens that I've encountered that would run out of certain things very quickly on a daily basis and never increase their order of those things. You could even ask 'Do you have any more X?' and they would say 'No, they always sell out really quickly'...
[Phil] Geez, Phil, are you running a pub or trying to make your eatery some sort of 'up-market' restaurant with fancy names for ordinary dishes? Surely a panino is just a bread roll into which, like a couple of bread slices, you can insert anything you damn well like? What's wrong with marketing a 'Salad Roll' or an 'Egg and Bacon Roll'?
[Dujon] In order: Yes and no; yes; and nothing. I just found the article interesting I'm revamping my menu, with an eye on relaunching the food side of the business to create some lunchtime trade in the area. Everyone's feedback has been very useful. We already do sandwiches and toasted sandwiches, but I've found that people charge a bit more for something that doesn't come in traditional English white or brown bread; more importantly, people seem willing to pay a bit more, for something that doesn't really cost any extra to produce if it's in, say, ciabatta rather than two slices of fantastic, locally baked bread.