Manganaro's - New York, NY

Posted By Michael Stern on February 28, 2006 9:08 PM

Ninth Avenue south of 42nd Street in midtown Manhattan is a round-the-world eating tour. Here are Esposito’s Pork Shop, the Nusret Halal Turkish meat market, Amazonia Brazilian juice bar, the West African Grocery, the Poseidon Greek bakery, cheese stores, fish markets, and greengrocers. The senior establishment in the area (since 1893) is Manganaro’s Grosseria, a well-weathered Italian grocery store with salamis hanging from the ceiling, an old-world antipasto bar, and an inventory of odoriferous cheeses.

Most of the dark wood interior of Manganaro’s is devoted to a lively take-out trade: lunch and dinner platters for dozens of people, groceries by the pound, and sandwiches to go. For eating on premises, there is a scattering of tables (as well as a banquet room upstairs). You walk past the cookies, cheeses, and giardiniera salads on display in cases towards the front of the store to a counter where you order a pasta plate or a sandwich made on a hero loaf or a round foccaccia bread. The sandwiches are big, fresh, and handsome, filled with first-rate ingredients ranging from elegant proscuitto de Parma to a choice of Italian or ordinary tuna. Available “extras” include roasted peppers, anchovies, sun-dried tomatoes, mozzarella, and pesto.

Party-length hero sandwiches are a big deal in this neighborhood, and we mean a really big deal. Signs all over Manganaro’s caution that this establishment is NOT RELATED to Manganaro’s Hero Boy, the modern sandwich shop next door that boasts of being the original home of the six-foot hero sandwich. Six-footers are also a specialty here at Manganaro Grosseria (dial 1-888-SIX-FOOT); and when we asked Manganaro’s proprietor Linda Dell’Orto if her store was the real originator of the big sandwich, she answered cryptically, “it started here.” The details of what is a long-standing family feud are too complicated for us to understand; suffice to say that the jumbo sandwiches we’ve watched carried out the door of this old shop (by two bearers, one at each end) are amazing-looking: ham, mortadella, two kinds of salami, capicola, proscuitto, Swiss cheese, provolone, peppers, lettuce, and just enough vinaigrette to glisten around the edges of the great bread log.

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Posted By Ted Christensen on November 2, 2011 10:37 PM

On my second visit, the woman at the counter (who I believe to be Sal's daughter) was in a conversation with another store employee, so our presence wasn't acknowledged. We were the only customers present. Finally, she asked us what we wanted and, after we said "meatballs," told us we needed to go to the back of the store, which I already knew from prior visits (but there was no one back there).

She then walked to the back and again asked what we wanted, but when she found out that the two of us wanted to split an order of meatballs and gravy, she said both of us must order our own entree. When we advised her that we split an order on a prior visit, she said "I am only nice once." She therefore refused to serve what we had asked for due to our cosmic error. I don't recall being treated so rudely for no apparent offense in my life, no kidding.

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Posted By David Marcus on February 10, 2011 9:31 AM

I can't offer an opinion of the cold sandwiches, but a chicken Parmesan sandwich I ordered was three small, thin, pre-cooked pieces of chicken and a little cheese heated in the microwave with some sauce poured over and placed on a too-thick roll. $12.

To top it off, the counter woman and her co-worker spent the entire time complaining loudly about their customers (the ones not present; I was the only patron at the time). They rudely shooed out a young couple who had the temerity to come into the restaurant portion of the grocery to look at the menu before deciding whether to stay. They were so obnoxious, and my sandwich so unsatisfying, that I just dumped it and walked out. To me, this angry, graceless place is the antithesis of what the Roadfood experience is supposed to be.

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Chicken Parmesan Sandwich

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