Marie is the greatest Italian-American cook of her generation I know. Her white-meat turkey is as juicy as most people’s concept of pork, and her pork is as ethereal as most people’s concept of heaven. The sandwiches come on semolina rolls so fresh I have begged the sisters to tell me where the bread is from, but they refuse. The fact that I can’t get this information makes me suspect that it is from Brooklyn, better known for its bakeries than Queens. I don’t mind that it comes from Brooklyn, if indeed it does, but I think the sisters worry that if it becomes known in the neighborhood that their bread isn’t local, they will be looked upon as snobs.
The regulars—and it doesn’t take long to be accepted as one—are all treated identically. The sisters’ greetings are effusive, even if you’re stopping in for the second time that week. Irene or Marie comes out from behind the counter for a hug, and the questions begin: “Where have you been?” is usually the first, as though you have betrayed their trust by staying away for three days. After that, the inquiries delve into essential family matters: “How’s you wife?” “How’s your mom and dad?” Next they check into the in-laws. I always regret not carrying medical charts with me.
Carmela is quieter, but I have always suspected the reason for this is because she wishes to appear composed in front of her daughter, who sometimes works in the store. Carmela’s daughter is still known as Little Marie, even though she is fully grown and teaches second grade 2 8 0
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down the block at PS 16. Also in the shop every day is Nancy DeBenedittis, the mother of the three sisters and the woman who inspired the nickname Mama’s. Now in her eighties, she sits in her usual place, the single small table in the corner, where she slices open the long semolina rolls that are used for sandwiches or peels the garlic used in Marie’s recipes. “Write good thing,” she warned me, the last time I wandered into the store. I’m certain she didn’t realize she was holding a paring knife at the time.
Many years ago, because of her presence, Leo’s started to be called Nancy’s by the customers. Then the girls were born and started running around the shop yelling “Mama, Mama!”—so the nickname changed.
Nancy keeps an eye on her daughters at all times, determined to keep them serious. This is nearly impossible.
The sisters still laugh about the time they brought a delivery to the Food Network, then located in Midtown Manhattan. Irene, who is the most easily flustered sister, despite her previous profession as a first-grade teacher, recalls that she became disconcerted when they arrived with their bags of food. “We got out of this taxi, here’s this tall building, I’m nervous, we’re late, I’m fighting with the taxi driver, there are all these men outside in jackets and ties. I said to Marie, ‘How are we going to get all this food up to the thirty-first floor?’ She said to me, ‘Will you shut up! They have elevators. Do you want them to think we came from a farm?’ ”
In a way, they did. The first Leo’s Latticini, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, was started in the late 1920s by Irene and Frank Leo, immigrants from Bari, a city in southeastern Italy. Once in America, Frank got a job working for the railroad. After that, he opened a wholesale ice and coal business. When gas heaters and electric refrigerators put him out of business, he decided to start selling food. In the mid-1930s the family moved to Queens, which looked nothing like it does today. Now essentially a sprawling expanse of undersize dwellings with plastic awnings, fake-stone fronts, and microscopic yards, at that time “it was like country here, like a farm, there were so many trees,” Nancy recalls. “For us, coming to Corona was like comF O R K I T O V E R
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ing on vacation.” And she adds, “We felt that here we could better ourselves.”
Newcomers to America still find their way to Queens, although the borough today is composed not so much of immigrants from Europe as from everywhere in the world. People from more than a hundred nations live there, and Corona has as colorful a history as any place in America. To TV addicts, it is famous as the habitat of Archie Bunker, the rascally racist from All in the Family. To jazz aficionados, Corona is celebrated as the home of the musician Louis Armstrong, who lived in a brick fortress of a house from 1943 until his death in 1971. (Legend has it that Armstrong’s fourth wife bought the house without his seeing it, and when he walked in he left his suitcases in the car, telling the driver to wait, he probably wasn’t going to stay.) To art collectors, Corona is remembered as the storied headquarters of the Tiffany glass company. When Louis Comfort Tiffany decided to make glass in America even more beautiful than what he saw in France, he picked Corona as the spot to do it.
The place Frank and Irene Leo opened in the 1930s was about half the size of the current store, which itself isn’t very large, merely a few strides from end to end. Back then Frank made his mozzarella in the basement. His work was continued by his son-in-law, Frank DeBenedittis, who was the husband of Nancy and father of the three sisters.
DeBenedittis had started in the dairy business back in Italy, bringing a cow from door-to-door and milking it for customers. The sisters grew up in the store, none more profoundly than Marie, whose playpen sat squarely in the middle. Irene remembers her grandfather worrying that the twine holding the massive provolones that hung from the ceiling might not be strong enough and
