By Dennis Marrero

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Keeping the spirit of a small fourth-generation store while adding e-retailing, an upscale wine shop and a major expansion takes an eye to the future and a firm grounding in the past. Lou Di Palo of Di Palo’s Fine Foods guides us through the store’s evolution.

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For the past 84 years, renowned New York City Italian specialty food shop, Di Palo’s Fine Foods has resided at the same intersection of Mott and Grand Streets, becoming a fixture in Manhattan’s Little Italy even as the neighborhood changed around it.

But time hasn’t stood still for Di Palo’s, which opened as a latteria, or dairy store, making fresh mozzarella and ricotta, and transformed itself into a premier retail establishment with cheeses, meats and specialty products spanning all 20 regions of Italy. At the end of 2008, third-generation owners Lou Di Palo, brother Salvatore Di Palo and sister Marie Canao opened a neighboring Italian wine shop with a 200-variety selection, also encompassing every Italian region. With its first major expansion since 2002 to be completed this summer, the food store will increase its total area from 1,200 square feet to more than 2,000. An additional 2,000-square-foot basement level is slated to be equally divided into a kitchen and an extra sales floor in the near future.

Di Palo’s has also launched an online store, introduced last September, and in March 2009 partnered with acclaimed chef, cookbook author and restaurateur Lidia Bastianich to expand on the venture.


The Early Years
The Di Palo family is making changes to adapt to their current clientele, but they are committed to preserving the company’s historic roots.

The current owners’ grandparents, Concetta and Luigi, opened Di Palo’s in 1925 in a 400-square-foot space on Mott Street. (Concetta’s father, Savino, opened the family’s first latteria in 1910 a half block away from the store’s present location.)

The family business evolved through the years with Concetta and Luigi expanding the cheese selection to include Caciocavalo, Provolone, Pecorino Romano and other hard cheeses that could withstand sea voyages without refrigeration. When the owners’ sons returned home from World War II, the store expanded its product line to include cured meats.


The Third Generation Takes the Reins
When Lou and siblings took over the store in the 1980s, their plan for growth began with a look to the past. Although the neighborhood’s Italian community was diminishing, they chose to stay the course. “We decided that instead of moving locations or [changing the store’s focus], we would go back to the time of our grandparents and great-grandparents to understand what a true Italian store is supposed to be,” explains Lou. “And by going backward, we took three giant steps forward.”

Lou began traveling regularly to Italy, hand-selecting products from artisan producers. Today, the retailer carries thousands of items with close to 300 different Italian cheeses alone at any given time. (An annual Zagat’s survey has named Di Palo’s New York City’s best quality cheese shop since 1999.) While its handmade fresh mozzarella remains a steady favorite, Di Palo’s wide selection allows customers to find cheeses from specific areas, made with diverse milk blends during different seasons—all of which factor into a cheese’s taste profile, Lou notes. For instance, the store features elusive varieties such as Trentingrana from Trentino, which is in the family of Grana Padano but has characteristics of a Parmagiano.

Di Palo’s remained in its same location for 77 years, expanding to 800 square feet before Lou and his siblings decided to move across the street in 2002. “It was traumatic for us even though we were only moving from the Northeast corner to the Northwest corner,” says Lou. But, the move gave the retailers an opportunity to renovate without needing to close the store. It also opened up room for the expansion that’s currently underway. “And we can still make the claim that we’ve been on the corner of Mott and Grand Streets since 1925,” Lou notes.

Maintaining its Italian corner store appeal has been a challenge in a neighborhood filled with visiting tourists and an evolving ethnic mix. “We are not a gourmet store and we are not a tourist store,” Lou says. Di Palo’s caters to its community first and foremost. “We don’t lose sight that we are a representation of an Italian immigrant store: family run, family oriented, personally involved and behind the counter,” he continues. So while it is not unusual for top chefs like Mario Batali to swing by, Di Palo’s focuses on each customer, giving them as much attention as they require. This makes for long wait times during busy days that can range from one to two hours, or four hours during the Christmas season, says Lou.  


Di Palo 2.0
The company passion for Italian artisan foods is reflected in its new online store, DiPaloselects.com, produced with igourmet. Among the cheeses, meats, pastas, grains, honeys, preserves, oils, vinegars and Italian pantry items, the site also hosts a collection of videos showing Lou interacting with producers, diary entries of his experience in selecting cheeses and other specialty products and a blog for general company news. Although customers will have to go to the brick-and-mortar location to get certain items such as Di Palo’s homemade mozzarella, the website offers most of the same stock. 

Lou’s extensive knowledge about Italian products and the site’s expansive selection are the main reasons Lidia Bastianich chose to partner her website, lidiasitaly.com, with DiPaloselects.com and recommend it to her viewers and readers as one of her sources for fine Italian products. “I want to deliver what I talk to my viewers about on my show,” she says, referring to Lidia’s Italy, her acclaimed cooking show on PBS. “[Lou] is genuine and he knows his traditional products.”

Before their online partnership, Bastianich would shop at Di Palo’s for her New York restaurants, Felidia and Becco, and for her personal use. After returning from research trips to Italy, Bastianich recalls, she would go to Lou with her demands: “You need to go to this producer for his cheese and this one for his smoked ricotta.” After building this close relationship over the years, endorsing Di Palo’s products with her seal of approval was easy. “I recommend other stores on my show, but when you talk about traditional Italian products, especially cheeses, I trust Di Palo’s 100 percent.”


The Wine Library
With the introduction of its wine store, Enoteca Di Palo, in November 2008, the store’s Italian experience is complete. The meaning of enoteca, Lou explains, is a library of wines. “The key is not just to buy a bottle of wine,” he says, “but to learn about the wine, the specific grape, specific area and the preferred drinking age.”

New York state law prohibits wine and food from being sold in the same store, so the new wine shop was opened two doors down from Di Palo’s original entrance on Grand Street and now shares a wall with the expanded food store. Two large windows on the shared wall give patrons on the grocery end a look into the stunning wine shop. Complementing its brick walls and vaulted wood ceilings, the wine shop features two Murano glass chandeliers, separated by another chandelier made of rock crystal, brass and Murano crystal, hanging in a linear path. The furniture, custom made by a craftsman from Bergamo, Italy, is constructed of stained wooden wine boxes to give the store a rustic feel. The wine shop is modeled after traditional Italian versions with a temperature-controlled selling area set at 60 degrees F. year round and a downstairs cantina set at 55 degrees F.

Enoteca Di Palo is the brainchild of Sam Di Palo, Lou’s son and part of the fourth generation in the family business. (As Lou puts it, “If you want to know something about food, I’ll tell you about the cow and the grass it eats…but Sammy is going to tell you about the [wine] producer.”) Sam pushed for the addition of the wine store after graduating from Northern Italy’s University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Bra.

Although he worked at Di Palo’s before leaving to school, he says, “I was doing what I was told but not making decisions or contributions.” The first thing he learned abroad, Sam says, “was how much I didn’t know and how much progress I needed to make.” Like his father, he now travels frequently to Italy and has visited 90 percent of the wineries that Enoteca represents.

Enoteca’s product mix does not cater to those looking for a cheap bottle of table wine. Sam has made a point of stocking select vintages from small producers. “A lot of these producers didn’t even have an importer in America and others you can only find in restaurants,” he explains. His goal is to rotate a variety of wines while keeping all regions represented. Selections include Franciacortas from Lombardy, Nero d’ Avola from Sicily, Cannonau from Sardinia and Nero de Troia from Puglia. Enoteca also offers a selection of Italian liquors, such as grappa and limoncello, from small producers.


Making Room
The recent expansion will add yet another dimension to Di Palo’s. Located between the original storefront and the Enoteca, the new space provides some much-needed room for customers to explore the mostardas, olive oils, chocolates and other Italian specialties on offer.

Like the Enoteca, the expanded store has a distinct Italian style. The walls are coated with soft green Venetian stucco made of pulverized marble. Scenic photographs and Italian art, including a traditional ceramic mosaic from Ravenna, are on display and the two windows looking into the wine shop are centered with two of the Enoteca’s chandeliers. Sam says that this will make shoppers more aware of the wine shop. “It will appear to be the wine section of the cheese store,” he says. 

The extra room will also give Di Palo’s the opportunity to expand into prepared foods, including take-home family dinners made fresh that day. The basement area will provide an additional kitchen area and is equipped with a dumbwaiter to ship orders up to the deli. Once renovated, it will also have a selling space, which will house traditional Italian housewares.

The wine store, website and recent expansion are all coming at a time when many companies are scaling back investments, but the Di Palos felt the time was right to expand. Lou notes that the economic crisis has taken a small toll on purchase amounts, but he has noticed an increase in traffic. “Instead of [a customer] buying a full pound of Prosciutto di Parma, they’ll get a half pound and a half pound of mortadella,” he explains. He has also seen people getting smaller cuts of cheese, but returning more often to restock.


Family Ties
Much has changed since the original store’s inception, but the Di Palo family continues to make fresh dairy on premise and serve their customers working side by side. Customers may even get the chance to see three generations of Di Palos in the store at one time. Viola Di Palo, Lou’s mother, has witnessed the company’s growth for decades and now she gets to see her grandchildren take their places behind the counter. In addition to Sam, younger cousins Jessica, Marie’s daughter, and Steven, Sal’s son, are also involved in the business, and Sam says they both show great potential. Although he is unsure what the future holds for the rest of the new class of Di Palos, “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else,” Sam notes. “Working with your family can be the hardest thing, but the family is also the spine of the business and there is no one you can trust more.” |SFM|

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