Torino Panino — Restaurant in San Jose

Ordered pickup at lunch. As others have mentioned, the price is quite high for a sandwich. However you do get quite a bit of food. I got the Chicken Cacciatore sandwich, "make it hot", with provolone.

For lunch, I ate half. The provolone was completely unmelted, chicken was pretty average (drier than I'd hoped for), and it was chicken cutlets, which was a bit disappointing since the website looked liked braised/pulled chicken. "Make it hot" is a joke, there's no heat to be found whatsoever. Not even sriracha level of heat. Not bad, but I didn't find the flavors to really come through all that well.

Reheated the other half for dinner. Convection 325f, 10 mins wrapped, then opened the sandwich and cooked another ~10 mins unwrapped. Then added some freshly grated parmiggiano along with some hot sauce from a Mediterranean restaurant. The extra salt from the parmiggiano really got the flavors of the base sandwich to shine through, and the hot sauce actually added some heat. Far superior to what I had at lunch.

Truffle chips were good. Bread was also quite good.

Lunch was like a 6/10, dinner was 8.5/10. The base sandwich is definitely there. But just needs a bit more to tip it...

One of my favorite sandwiches is an Italian beef sandwich. When I saw the sign stating that they made those there, I was really excited to try it.

When I walked into that part of the restaurant or store, pour a combination of both. It was kind of confusing, but there was nobody behind the counter, so I had to walk through the store part to the other restaurant pizza spot in order to order my sandwich.

It seemed like the store was mostly a wine spot and yeah, they offer some other italian staples as far as food goes in the restaurant.

I was kind of disappointed in the sandwich. I asked them to make it wet, and they didn't dip the bread, they just gave me a dry sandwich with a little side of au. Ju Kind of reminding me of a French dip. Don't get me wrong. I like french dip sandwiches, but I was there to have an italian beef and I guess the experience was just different than what I was expecting.

While the herb juice that they gave me for the sandwich was good, there was not nearly enough of it. And the rest of the sandwich was just kind of dry. It definitely did not remind me of a chicago italian beef.

It'll probably be a while before I...

Holy mercy... This place popped up twice today, once when my wife was browsing TikTok (😒) but again in The Downtowner newsletter I receive, so we went for a late lunch. We didn't realize that it was a shared space, so we also got to try a slice of pizza and some fries, both of which came out quickly and very fresh, and I had an Old Fashioned, just because. By the time we finished the pizza and the fries, we didn't even get a chance to try the sandwich, so we took it to-go, a bit disappointed that we didn't try it hot and fresh.

Well. I just tried a bite a bit ago, and even cold and a bit soggy, it. Was. Incredible. My only real reference to an Italian beef sandwich is the few times I've tried Portillo's in the Midwest, and this was head and shoulders above their offerings. My bite turned into me finishing half of the sandwich without even realizing it. Their herb/spice blend is amazing, and I am now counting down the days until we have an excuse to get back out to Little Italy--we don't live far, so hopefully it won't...