We visit the day and night cafe Pania which opened in the Merchant City earlier in 2024 where we were talked through their Mediterranean menu including a cheese and charcuterie board.
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00:00Where's my hair Jimmy? Where's my hair?
00:04Hello, my name is Neil Connolly. I'm the owner of Pania. Pania is a kind of day-night cafe. My influence is
00:13very much Mediterranean. I love the simplicity of
00:18going into a cafe in Spain, Italy, France and
00:23finding amazing produce
00:25just done simply. So everything we do is very straightforward.
00:30It's not complicated.
00:32Kind of less is more. All the hard work's been done by the producers.
00:36So the
00:37produce that I buy is really good.
00:39I have amazing suppliers. The chorizo is, I've been told by lots of people, the best chorizo they'll ever have and
00:46I'm not arguing with that.
00:48The two boards that we do at night time, so during the day
00:52it's a very simple brunch and we make fresh sandwiches every day and put them in this glass cabinet.
00:58You can see that there, all the fresh sandwiches.
01:02Everything's done fresh.
01:04Everything's, when we do all the cheese and the charcuterie at night, it's all cut to order.
01:09So we buy whole hams, we buy whole salamis and we just cut when we need to. So the difference that makes as well is
01:15incredible. They're all Spanish cheeses. So this is a Mahon from Menorca and we have a semi-cured Manchego.
01:22This is a goat's cheese called Montenebro and what they do is they use the
01:28Roquefort culture and that's where you get this skin on it here.
01:32So what we do is we suggest you try the goat's cheese on its own and then you try it with the
01:39culture on the side and the taste is amazing. And then this is the Picas Blue. You'll either love this or hate it.
01:45It's a very strong blue cheese. They wrap it in sycamore leaves and they age it in caves.
01:51So you get this really powerful blue cheese, but it's very smooth and creamy and that's my favorite cheese.
01:59We have a pickled fig, a couple of wee
02:03mix of pickles and
02:05a wee olive oil crackers. On here we've got the charcuterie and we have a
02:10salami Milano. We have two different types of chorizo. One's aged a wee bit longer, so it's a wee bit harder.
02:16It's air-dried, so it's a bit harder.
02:19We have a Spanish salchichon,
02:21which is just
02:23a kind of Spanish version of salami. They just use salt, pepper and a wee bit of garlic.
02:29But this is made with the Iberican pigs, so it's 100% belotta.
02:34So that's the pigs that have been fed on the acorns.
02:38So you get this lovely flavor coming through the meat. And then we have an
02:43observer
02:44serrano ham. So that's been aged for 18 months. And again, that's just that's absolutely amazing product.
02:51We use that in our sandwiches. We use that in our croque-monsieur. So again, we buy the whole ham and we just cut it up.