So I'm not quite sure if Panera is a national phenomenon yet, but it should be. One challenge of moving to the Charlotte area from the Northeast has been to try to recognize what's a chain and what's not, or which restaurants are Charlotte originals or more regionals chains.
In any event, Panera is a lot like Au Bon Pain, for those familiar with that restaurant, but this location at least is a lot bigger. It's huge, which made for a pretty efficient ordering process when I was in there recently during the lunch crunch. That's huge in city with so many people leaving their offices to descend on the same few lunch places. I liked that about Panera--and it's super clean and well-run, too.
As for the food, I was very pleased. Try the Chicken Caesar sandwich--it's huge and was really fresh. The bread, obviously, was amazing, hence the name of the place. And all of it was very affordable too.