Our Three Cheese Panini

Humans weren’t born yesterday. In fact, we’ve been on this planet cooking cheese and bread for a long time. We’re pretty sure the moment fire was invented, a line formed immediately for everyone’s cheese to be toasted. But it wasn’t until the 20th century when the U.S. really got down to business in the cooked bread and cheese game, and the ubiquitous Grilled Cheese as we know it was born.

Like many of our greatest inventions, the Grilled Cheese arose out of necessity. In the 1920s, sliced bread and American cheese were relatively inexpensive and some genius decided to slap some butter on the bottom of the bread, layer the top with cheese, and cook the daylights out of it.

When the Great Depression hit the country in the 1930s, the Grilled Cheese was renamed the Cheese Dream — PR appears to have been a thriving business, even then — probably because giving something a fancy name makes it more than acceptable to serve to guests, without doing too much damage to one’s wallet. And moreover, given the choice between the American Dream and the Cheese Dream, which would you choose? We rest our case.

We’ve got a modern, Latin-local Cheese Dream on our lunch menu. You may know it by a slightly less aspirational moniker: the Three Cheese Panini. It’s comfort food at its finest, with chihuahua, cotija and cheddar melted and perfectly gooey, plus a little avocado (almost everything is better with a little avocado). Pickled fresnos and salsa verde add the La Sirena Clandestina bite that you’ve come to expect from this Mermaid Shack.