When it involves approaching change, prioritizing custom within the method appears key: “These days, there are machines for everything,” says Illardi. “But with bread, especially real artisan breads, it will always be better handmade. You need to do it, from start to finish, by hand.” It’s a balancing act that each old-school store is navigating: maintain the core intact whereas adjusting to a Brooklyn that not seems just like the one they grew up in.
Walk into Caputo’s Fine Foods, simply a few blocks away—opened in 1973 by Sicilian immigrant Giuseppe Caputo and his spouse Flora—and also you’ll see this play out. Learning from their father, who’s nonetheless concerned, a third era now runs the present: brothers Franco and Joseph Caputo, who took over in 2021 after leaving regulation faculty and enterprise internships behind to return in the course of the pandemic.
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“It was a feeling of nostalgia, wanting to move back, work at the store and take over,” [Joseph] Caputo says. “But our number one question was: How can we modernize the store, bring in new customers, and keep it clean—without ever really losing that ‘it’s been here for 50 years feel’?”
Since, Caputo’s has been subtly renovated and restored with this balanced strategy. First, by exposing the unique brick, then reducing the ceiling-high old-wire racks to make the brick seen; and choosing a felt-board pin signal the menu. Most just lately, they modified the pendant lighting to recreate what it as soon as was: a inexperienced aluminum lighting fixture that Joseph present in a classic store.
“We know what the store had when we were kids. Little by little, we’re trying to bring that back,” says Caputo. “You really wouldn’t notice the difference—but it’s all how all of these details add up.” And when it comes all the way down to the products? Caputo’s is the spot for mouth-watering mortadella, arancini balls, and of course, fresher-than-fresh mozzarella. Known for making some of the perfect mozzarella within the metropolis, the new-age Caputo brothers discovered from generations of mozzarella makers. “As young as I could remember, I was taught to know the feel of how mozzarella should be,” says Caputo. “We know what we’re looking for now, because it’s true to our nature—and somehow it ends up on all of these lists for the best mozzarella in the city.”
According to Caputo, thriving as a enterprise in tougher-than-nails Brooklyn is about truly eager to be a half of the neighborhood. “You gotta understand—the community wants you there and they don’t want you to change much; so in order to change—you still need to fit in. All of the old-school Italians that come in—we want to make sure they don’t feel alienated; and that everyone in the neighborhood is happy to chat with us or even try something new,” says Caputo. “I don’t see the generations that have been coming here stopping anytime soon—we’re still their neighborhood spot even if they moved out of Brooklyn years ago.”
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You can’t faux prosciutto bread baked on web site all day. You can’t automate mozzarella pulled by hand. You can’t mass-produce the sensation of strolling into a place the place your mother and father and grandparents ordered the identical sandwich you’re about to eat. People discover, and so they return. “We have customers who come back every single holiday, even if they moved,” says Illardi. “They want the taste they remember.”