Just when he thought he was out … they pulled him back in.
Eight months after selling Mastellone Italian Deli to a new owner, Vinny Badala has reclaimed his beloved Court Street gastronomia — and brought in his longtime butcher James Raffaele as a partner in thyme.
The pair bought back the deli amidst allegations that the new owners didn’t have the sfrontatezza — that’s Italian for moxie — to run a real Italian grocery store.
“If you’re going to run a deli on this street and call it ‘Mastellone,’ you need to know Italian food,” Badala said this week, standing next to a newly restocked deli counter in a clean white apron.
Badala sold the 30-year-old grocery last July when co-owner Carmello Costantino retired, handing over the business to a family that assured him they “knew a lot of something,” as Raffaele recalls, about the store’s trademark specialty imports and fresh pasta.
Turned out that they didn’t even know a little about something.
And not only were the new owners fuzzy on the differences between capicola and sopressata, they allegedly didn’t know the local language of neighborhood commerce: chitchat.
“It was a black day in the neighborhood,” said Tina Pirelli, a longtime shopper and the author of “Brooklyn Lasagna,” a collection of vignettes about the neighborhood.
“The store was practically empty. They didn’t say ‘hello’ to people who have been shopping there forever. They didn’t know the neighborhood. We were all very depressed.”
Or as Raffaele put it: “I know people when I don’t know people. They didn’t have that.”
By winter, the shop’s new owners had fired three stockboys, an assistant butcher and three cashiers, including Rose Russo, who was born two blocks away and worked the checkout line for over a decade.
“I knew it was coming, but that didn’t make it right,” said Russo, who began asking Raffaele to deliver her groceries when he was still in junior high.
Soon after the new owners axed Russo, the deliman decided that the kitchen had gotten hot enough and called his former boss. The two decided to go in as partners and buy back the store.
“I signed the check, ordered a case of good sausage and called Rose to tell her to come back to work,” said Raffaele.
This week, the store was as talky as one of the neighborhood’s old social clubs as customers, new, old and temporarily exiled stopped in to say hello to the new old owners.
Jeff Thomas discussed a recipe for meat loaf with Badala.
“I had stopped coming,” said Thomas. “But now that they are back, I feel like I almost know something about Italian food again.”
