In Mantes-la-Jolie, 50 kilometres west of Paris, some people drive for an hour to eat a panuozzo — a stuffed sandwich made from pizza dough. They queue outside a small shop at 17 Rue Porte-aux-Saints, wait their turn, choose their filling and often even film themselves taking the first bite before posting it on social media.
Stracciatella, pesto, Gorgonzola, peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, caramelised onions, beef pancetta, bacon or veal topside: all halal.
A culinary phenomenon
The shop is called Trisapori, and the French media have turned it into one of the food stories of the year. Radio station RTL describes “hours on the road, endless queues and millions of views on TikTok”, calling the panuozzo a traditional Italian sandwich whose bread sits somewhere between pizza dough and a classic loaf.
The free newspaper 20 Minutes is even more categorical: “Neither pizza nor sandwich”, but a loaf made from pizza dough, stretched into a baguette-like shape, baked, sliced open, filled and put back in the oven. And it wonders whether, after pizza and pinsa, the panuozzo might be the next Italian speciality to conquer the French street-food scene.
But the best part of the story comes before the queues.
Behind Trisapori are Céline Bartolomeo and Sabre Benabdalla. She is Italian, from Campania, and used to work in marketing; he is of Moroccan origin and was a bank executive. In 2021, as soon as travel resumed after Covid, they drove around Rome, Naples and Florence, visiting delicatessens, looking at cured meats, cheeses and fresh pasta, and tasting everything they could. They began imagining a place of their own.
A taste of Italy
The idea also grew out of their life at home. Céline converted to Islam and wanted to continue eating the Italian food she had grown up with while observing halal dietary rules. Sabre travelled around the Île-de-France looking for good pork-free charcuterie and found what seemed to him a market with few alternatives: expensive halal restaurants at one end, kebabs, tacos and fast food at the other.
What was missing, they felt, was somewhere casual but carefully done: Italian food that was not exclusive, and halal food that was not aimed at just one community.
“I’m Italian, I come from an area not far from Naples, and I wanted people here to discover this sandwich, which I’ve eaten all my life. I couldn’t find the products I liked in the bakeries here,” Céline said.
Trisapori opened on September 20, 2022.
At first, the story was anything but a fairy tale. The street saw little foot traffic and customers were scarce. Céline and Sabre sold fresh pasta and Italian cheeses and, to keep the project going, borrowed money from relatives, entered competitions for young businesses and sought financial support. For six months, Sabre has said, the business simply wasn’t working.
Then a bread invented 43 years earlier in Gragnano, near Naples, entered the story.
It was 1983 when pizza maker Giuseppe Mascolo prepared something for his children to eat using the dough he already had to hand. Instead of stretching it into a pizza base, he shaped it into a long loaf, baked it, sliced it open and filled it with pancetta and mozzarella. His 13-year-old daughter Pasqualina gave it a name: panuozzo, a little loaf of bread.
After pancetta and mozzarella came provola, sausage and friarielli, aubergines, vegetables and cured meats. Gragnano made it a local speciality, and the panuozzo spread across the Lattari Mountains, from Pimonte to Agerola and Sant’Antonio Abate, eventually becoming part of Campania’s repertoire of traditional foods.
Today, in Mantes-la-Jolie, it arrives in the same shape but with different fillings — and, above all, a different audience. Pork pancetta gives way to beef, while the bacon is made from veal. Stracciatella, pesto, Gorgonzola, vegetables and ingredients imported from Italy remain.
It is not so much about inventing a “Muslim panuozzo” as solving a problem Céline and Sabre know well. Sabre explains it through gatherings of their two families.
“My in-laws aren’t Muslim. At the table there was always a divide: some things were for us, others for them. And we wanted to get rid of that distinction.”
Fertile ground
In a town like Mantes-la-Jolie, the idea found fertile ground. The Val-Fourré neighbourhood has been home to a large population of North African origin for decades, and halal businesses are part of everyday life. But non-Muslim customers soon began joining the queues outside Trisapori too, drawn by the new sandwich.
Then, in April 2025, Happy Cook arrived. The chef and Instagrammer tried the panuozzo, posted a video and called it the best sandwich in France. It was the spark that set off a social-media phenomenon that shows no sign of slowing down. By 2026, RTL was reporting hundreds of videos and millions of views.
Meanwhile, the panuozzo has made its way to Paris.
Panozzi, which explicitly highlights the sandwich’s Gragnano origins and describes it as “an original alternative to pizza”, has outlets in the Marais, the 8th arrondissement and on the Canal Saint-Martin, as well as in Vincennes. On Rue de Berri, just a few steps from the Champs-Élysées, Atelier Napoli specialises in halal Neapolitan panuozzi. In Pigalle, Magio bills itself as an Italian halal sandwich shop specialising in panuozzi, made with house-baked bread, stracciatella from Puglia and Genoese pesto.
Trisapori, too, is preparing to make the leap to Paris. But Céline is keen to stress that the new venue will not simply be about chasing the latest food craze. The panuozzo will remain one of its signature offerings, but the original idea remains unchanged: to introduce Italian products to an audience that previously had little chance to encounter them in this form.
And so, 43 years after a pizza maker improvised a meal for his children, the panuozzo has left the Lattari Mountains and joined the queue outside a French shop. In Gragnano, they gave it its name. In Mantes-la-Jolie, they discovered just how many people could eat it together.
The translation of this article was reviewed by a Language Service Provider