We waited to eat here for an hour. It was lunch time, on a Sunday. Perhaps a nice plate of pasta was a big ask for a side-trip on a journey home: maybe we should have made it the centre-piece of our weekend, and planned around it. If so, I might have spent a little longer appreciating the truffle oils, the brioche buns, the ragu, etc. The food was not terrible, even if it was a bit too rich and greasy. But the staff were clearly ill-equipped to deal with even the modest Winter crowd.
There's a point at which you get over a long wait for food: you start to laugh about it, try to make lemonade from lemons. There's a point past that. It's a horrible point, where conversation fails. You're not sure whether to lay your head on the table and sleep through the wait, or to just surreptitiously leave and hope nobody notices. There is no food that can be enjoyed after that point, and as such Panino presents itself in an unlikeable context. read more