Mazzaro’s Italian Market covers an entire block of 22nd Avenue in St. Petersburg, Florida, and each year, its fervent fans mark their calendars for its sumptuous holiday food—chocolate-covered strawberries for Valentine’s Day, breads and fruit-studded pastries for Easter, butternut squash arancini appetizers for Thanksgiving. But nothing compares to the Christmas scene at the 1993-opened fine food market.
A big cheese literally kicks off the season. “We get a 950- to 1,000-pound loaf of Auricchio Stravecchio, a very aged, very sharp provolone,” manager Rob Smith says. “We’re told it’s the biggest one imported into the country.”
Photo: Rodrigo Mendez
Cheese at Mazzaro’s.
This year, the ceremony of wheeling out and cutting the cheese takes place on December 3, when a team of cheesemongers and managers will slice the black-wrapped, rope-strapped log into wheels and hundreds of crumbly samples using a custom knife made by a loyal customer. “He’s a knife-maker from Italy,” Smith explains. “He came to the cheese-cutting last year and realized our knives weren’t long enough, so he made us one.”
Every year, devotees show up to watch, kibbitz, and then head indoors to shop for wine, specialty meats, seafood, housemade pastas, coffee beans roasted on-site, and every Italian sweet imaginable. For the holidays, the shelves overflow with Christmas cake, pandoro sweet bread, and cookies. “Lots of cookies,” Smith emphasizes. “Thumbprints, wedding cookies, wine biscuits, snowballs, red and green sugar cookies—everybody loves them.”
In the week before Christmas, Mazzaro’s opens its doors every day at 9:00 a.m. to a line of three hundred to four hundred, Smith estimates. But no one seems to mind the wait: Everyone’s chatting, and some are chatting in Italian, he says. “You’ll be standing in line for a sandwich with the guy who drives a garbage truck, pro baseball players like the Tampa Bay Rays, Catholic priests, TV actors, people from ten different countries. We get a lot of local law enforcement. At lunchtime this is the safest place in town.”
Photo: Rodrigo Mendez
Mazzaro’s deli.
Before or after filling their baskets, many customers order lunch from the deli to eat on the patio: maybe a Hot Italian sandwich and a cup of Italian wedding soup. (Pro tip: Take a number and know what you want when it’s called to keep things friendly.) And all day, about a dozen people will be sitting on stools at the coffee counter, drinking espresso and eating pastries.
“At Christmas season, it’s organized mayhem,” Smith says. “Everyone’s on a mission to get something special for their holiday, whether it’s homemade pierogies, ravioli, fish for the Feast of the Seven Fishes, or the homemade gelati…and pretty much everyone gets a panettone. This time of year, we have three people just making lasagnas all day long. The week before Christmas, we’ll make 4,200 lasagnas.”
One niche that’s tucked near the deli and opposite the wine cave is full of religious statues, saints draped with rosaries, silver charms, mysterious little mementos, and a pine cone. Smith points at the pine cone in the shrine but doesn’t touch it. “Someone put it there, probably with a special prayer, so we don’t remove it,” he says. “We respect that. And those statues are protecting us. Not a week goes by that I don’t have to say, ‘The statues are not for sale.’” Fortunately, the edible bounty is.
Dining and Cooking