It didn’t take long for Stefanino Panino to outgrow its home in Brunswick East, Melbourne. At the Italian-style sandwich joint’s original shop – which owner Stef Condello calls a shoebox – lines and sell-outs were a regular occurrence.

“The last day of trade there, we sold 300 rolls,” he says. “Generally, it was 100-ish a day – 150, 200. The other limitation was staff. We couldn’t really fit more than three human bodies behind the fridge in that space, so that would obviously limit the output that we could do.”

Since moving into the Collingwood Yards precinct in the city’s inner north, Stefanino Panino has found space to stretch its legs, adding an espresso machine and room for diners to eat in.

Condello has taken the chance to streamline some processes behind the scenes, too, evolving from the very manual Lygon Street days. “The very first iteration, we actually wrote directly on the sandwich paper,” he says. “One of the staff members realised that was absolutely cooked so we went to a docket rail – you could just turn around and chuck it in the docket rail, that’s how small the shop was.”

With the bigger space and some Square tech, the team is now better equipped to deal with the lunchtime lines; now they can even shoot dockets from the front of house area to the kitchen and espresso zone separately. He’s also using Square to help with larger catering orders – another benefit of the new, bigger kitchen – and will soon launch a new website to make things even smoother. “That should be up and running in the next couple of months or so,” says Condello. “So yeah, it’s looking like we’ll be utilising Square for quite a while to come.”

Despite the upgrades, everything that made the shop popular in the first place can still be found here. Part of the appeal is the freshness – sandwiches are made to order rather than piled up in a glass case – but, more than anything, it’s Condello’s in-built passion for cured meats and cold-cuts that takes it to a different level.

“Growing up, my grandparents on my dad’s side would cure a lot of meat,” he says. “They’d make capocollo [and] prosciutto, make their own salamis and things like that. Super important growing up as an Italian was all the cured meats. I’m more into meat than I am sandwiches.”

It turns out that Melburnians are increasingly keen on their meats, too, with Stefanino Panino capturing the public’s fancy with sandwiches like the mortadella-heavy bologna. “Mortadella [is having] its time in the sun. No one was really interested in it, say, five years ago,” Condello says. “Central to that is preparing it properly, and mortadella needs to be cut as thin as possible. The OG Italians would come in and say, ‘Hey, this is cut super-thin.’ It was served with stracciatella, green olives and pickled peppers that are super challenging to find stock of. That was a hit initially.”

Moving to Collingwood Yards has given Condello the chance to add to the menu with ingredients that, in the tiny confines of the Lygon Street original, would have been impossible. Now you’ll find rolls filled with house- roasted porchetta with crackling (plus roasted peppers and provolone), poached chicken or smoked barramundi, with extraction fans, ovens and stovetops giving the team room to change things up.

Since Stefanino Panino first opened, Melbourne’s sandwich arms race seems to grow week-on-week. And while Condello has seen his share of imitators, he and his sandwiches continue to rise above the noise.

“Look, it’s easy to be a grumpy bum, but think you’ve got to take the compliment and pat yourself on the back and feel fortunate,” he says.

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Square.