Pepi’s deli is really Mario’s

By Geeta Sharma-Jensen Journal Times, October 20, 1985

RACINE — As delicatessens go, Pepi’s Italian Deli seems at first glance to be like most others around here.

Pressed meats and sausages share space with cheeses and salads in a glass-enclosed cooler. Jars of pickles and cans of sauce and seafood line shelves. Above the counter, white boards list the prices of sandwiches and drinks. And near the plate glass window, ice cream parlor-type chairs invite customers to sit and wait for orders.

But as you sit and wait you begin to realize Pepi’s is somehow different.

For one thing, the cans and jars seem to have come direct from Italy. For another there are the round, squat glass jars filled with olive-green vegetables. Those are eggplants, pickled the Italian way with fresh mint leaves in oil, a house specialty.

There’s also the bambino steak sandwich which, a chalkboard proclaims, contains slices of steak, mushrooms, onions, and bacon drizzled with a spicy Mexican sauce, another house specialty.

And pretty soon, you begin to get the idea you are in an ethnic deli which is mainly Italian, but si, si, there’s a bit of Mexican creeping in.

That’s because of Natcho and Mario, who started this small deli at 803 16th St. about two years ago.

Mario Aiello, 55, is a short, dark, bubbly man with a passion for simmering Italian sauces and making spaghetti and lasagna. He has run a barbershop on 16th Street for more than 30 years, and helped raise seven daughters. But his secret desire had been a deli, a place where he could serve his sauces and pickles.

“I always liked to cook,” he said recently as he snipped away at the blond hair of a customer in his shop. “So I always wanted to start a sandwich shop. Nine years ago, I wanted to do it but I didn’t have anybody to run it. Then, my son-in-law came along…”

That was Jose Torano, 27, nicknamed Natcho, an exchange student from Mexico whom his daughter had met in Mexico and got to know while both were at St. Catherine’s High School.

So, Mario remodeled part of the building he owned, got his sauces going, and with Natcho as manager, and the Aiello daughters as part-time help, Pepi’s was in business.

“We just started right from the bottom,” remembered Natcho, picking out an Italian cookie for a customer. “I didn’t know anything about cooking. He (Mario) taught me all I know. We started making meatballs and lasagna, sauces and salads. Then the sandwiches. We learned by looking. And some of the girls (Mario’s daughters) had experience in restaurants.”

Mario’s Italian cooking caught on. And now, says Natcho, the deli is happily holding its own. It’s open from 11 a.m. to about 7 p.m. six days a week and employs about seven part-timers.

“This is really nice. It’s been word of mouth,” he said. “We don’t advertise. Right now, we’re doing OK. We’re breaking even, paying the bills, and we’re keeping the family busy, and that’s enough for us right now. When we’re ready to handle more, we’ll advertise, we’ll be busier.”

These days Pepi’s does a brisk lunchtime business, attracting a crowd from S. C. Johnson & Son Inc. across the street. And as word has gotten around, the deli also has begun catering Italian-style hors d’oeuvres for business affairs and open houses.

Natcho concocts Mexican sauces and relishes using recipes his mother sends him from Mexico. His wife often helps cook the Mexican dishes Pepi’s serves. She and another daughter also make Italian and American cookies and desserts. But when Pepi’s caters an open house for 400 or so, Mario’s wife, a nurse at St Mary’s Hospital, and all seven daughters turn up to help.

“The whole family is there,” chuckled Mario. “… My wife’s German. That’s the big joke. And she’s making all these Italian trays.”

Mario said he learned to cook from his mother, who brought many of the recipes — like the one for pickled eggplant — from the “old country.”

Asked what makes a good sauce, he said, “Simmering. Cooking with love. No being overbearing on the spices. Going nice and easy. Yesterday, I had those big pots going until 6:30 at night. I started them at seven in the morning.”

While he cooks to his heart’s content, Natcho scours markets in Milwaukee, Kenosha and Chicago for authentic Italian and Mexican products, some of which they sell in the deli.

Their Italian-Mexican mixture may seem odd — “That’s American,” Mario says. But the marriage seems to be attracting customers.

Said Roger DeRose, a marketing manager at Johnson’s, who was in buying a Big Cheese submarine for $1.80, “I come here about once or twice a week. And I have the same thing every time I come. It’s always consistently good. They have a good variety of cheeses.”

Attorney Theodore Harris, also in for deli fixings, put it this way: “I come here all the time. I don’t think they have any competition, really, for the kind of thing they do.” *[Photo caption: Pepi’s Deli proprietor Mario Aiello, left, and Jose Torano, the deli’s manager. Photo by Chuck D’Acquisto, Journal Times]*