Lanche Prensado de Maringá

The lanche prensado appeared in Maringá in the second half of the 1980s. Maringá Histórica, the city’s heritage history, places its birth at the crossing of Avenida Brasil and Avenida São Paulo, where the owner of a hot dog cart had the insight to press or griddle the assembled hot dog – Maringá did not invent the press or the hot dog, the account stresses, but it fused the two into a third product. The same history notes that Au-Au is also named as the place where the lanche prensado is said to have arisen. A separate account carried by the Paraná state tourism portal traces the lineage instead to the McBeto stall on Avenida Mandacaru in the late 1980s, and contemporaries are reported to say the idea was copied from Londrina.

What is not in doubt is the scale that followed. Maringá Histórica counts almost 200 points of sale across the city, between mobile carts and fixed shops, and names maionese verde, a green herb mayonnaise, and bottled tubaína as accompaniments that became indispensable. In 2017 the style was declared the city’s typical dish by municipal law – Lei 10.435, of 23 August 2017, which declares the cachorro-quente prensado the typical dish of the municipality of Maringá. Protein variants sold across the city – sausage, minced meat, shredded chicken, calabresa and bacon among them – are menu options of this one dish, not separate styles.