All the combos at this Italian-inspired panino shop are ‘killers with delicious fillers’

We don’t publish full-length, scored reviews of sandwich shops very often, but you don’t often find Australian sandwich shops pouring Sicilian frappato by the glass. It’s also rare to find a panino loaded with Campari-glazed ham, porchetta, provolone and guindilla peppers that tastes like a Boxing Day-leftovers sandwich you might eat while spending Christmas in Tuscany.

At Arno Deli, you can flank that sandwich with olive oil-fried chips (the “crisp” kind) served with creme fraiche, salmon roe and jazz-hands spice-mix togarashi. After lunch, there’s coffee and very good cannoli. On Friday and Saturday nights, you might nab one of the outdoor tables for gildas and a grilled mortadella slider that’s a paradigm of “sometimes food”.

Launched by chef Will O’Brien in 2022, Arno is a tiny paninoteca and wine bar in the centre of Newcastle. White tiles. Forest-green menu board. Cardinal-red smallgoods scales. Lovely stuff. Every weekend there’s a throng of 20-something Novocastrians in various stages of beachwear and hangover waiting for, say, a rare roast-beef sandwich with red pesto, salsa verde and ricotta. When I lived in Newcastle 20 years ago, the pinnacle of meat-in-bread was a chicken tikka naan wrap from Darby Raj.

O’Brien’s Sydney restaurant experience ranges from fine-dining (including an early stint at Rockpool) to corporate catering, before he shifted north when his partner enrolled at Newcastle University. The inspiration to sell panini came after visiting legendary sandwich shop All’Antico Vinaio in Florence and ordering the La Favolosa with crumbly sbriciolona salami, pecorino and artichoke creams, and spicy eggplant on schiacciata flatbread. “The flavours were so intense,” he tells me over the phone. “I had never had a sandwich like it.”

Arno’s schiacciata has a crisp, crackled crust and nimbus-soft interior. You would be stoked just to have it with a little butter and ham, but the sandwiches are far more textured than that: mortadella with creamy stracciatella cheese and crushed pistachios; rosemary and black pepper-seasoned porchetta with fresh cos, fennel pollen, roast eggplant and aioli; smoked pepperoni, olives, buffalo mozzarella, rocket and tomato sugo. All killers with delicious fillers.

More than 50 panino options have been created for Arno over the past four years, and about 16 of those are available each day. My favourite might be the avocado and cucumber number with thin-sliced apple, guindilla peppers, shredded iceberg and gorgonzola-sharpened ranch dressing. Praise be to the chicken parm, too, featuring a fat schnitzel draped in smoked provolone with sugo, Calabrian chilli and a light snowfall of parmigiano.

O’Brien is set to shortly open a second Arno Deli that’s twice the size. The extra space will help the original site, too, which he never thought would be as popular as it has become. The new shop will be in suburban Adamstown, six kilometres from Newcastle’s CBD. This means the avocado and ranch sandwich will soon be six kilometres closer to my house, but that’s still nowhere near close enough.

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine