“The different hats I wear are: shop prepping, cooking, packing, delivering, dispatcher, customer service, graphic designer. Why I do everything is because I don’t know that you’re not supposed to do everything–I don’t come from the industry.” Bon Appétit spends a day on the line with chef Salvatore La Rosa, the one-man-show behind Brooklyn’s hottest new lunch delivery service, Salvo’s Cucina Casalinga.
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00:00I opened Salvo's, an Italian sandwich shop, out of my apartment in Queens,
00:04delivered via Go4 Interceptor. Salvo's began kind of by accident. I had posted
00:10something online that said I'm gonna be selling this food now. And since opening
00:14less than a year ago, I went from a couple customers to selling about 50
00:19sandwiches a week. The different hats I wear. Shop prepping, cooking, packing,
00:24delivering, dispatcher, customer service, graphic designer. Why I do everything
00:29is because I don't know that you're not supposed to do everything. I don't come
00:33from the industry.
00:39Hey, good morning. I'm Sal, owner of Salvo's Cocina Casalinga. It's about 8 a.m.
00:44and we got quite a few sandwiches to make, so we're gonna get started. Follow
00:49me up. Welcome. This is our workspace, my home kitchen. We're gonna get
00:59a couple of sandwiches going. First, we need to prep is a Genovese sandwich. This
01:04is sort of inspired by my childhood. Traditionally, it's ground beef in a
01:09sweet carrot and onion sauce. My family always had it as an entree. We're gonna
01:14cook beef loin and then slice it just as we did when I was a kid and start
01:19browning it. Just a couple minutes on each side just to get a nice color and
01:23color will translate as deliciousness. Yeah, my home kitchen. It's not
01:29restaurant-grade stuff. Salvo's does have food handlers license, but we've got like
01:34a home stove here, just a regular refrigerator here. It takes a bit for an
01:39object to find its place, but it works and this is also the way that I've been
01:43cooking my whole life. It's the way that my mom has been cooking, my grandmother,
01:47everyone in my family who I've learned to cook from cooked in kitchens just like
01:51this, so it works great for me. So while this is browning, we're gonna get
01:54started on prepping our onions and carrots. At the beginning of the week,
01:58Salvo's announces a few sandwiches. Today's Genovese sandwich as the
02:03special. The mortadella is kind of a fan favorite, so we're doing that as well
02:07today. When I was starting off, it was pretty much whatever I was eating for
02:13lunch is what I was gonna sell. Meat looks nice and brown. We're gonna take it
02:17out. So we're gonna add our onions here and these are gonna wilt quite a bit and
02:22get nice and sweet, nice and creamy. We're gonna get our carrots now. Working
02:27from the home kitchen definitely has its puzzles. It kind of looks like a deli's
02:33fridge. So there's a bit of the refrigerator that's kind of reserved for
02:37personal consumption, but for the most part, Mary and I were eating what I'm
02:42making for Salvo's anyway. Mary is my lovely girlfriend, super supportive of
02:48having me run my business out of my home kitchen, our home kitchen. Yeah, I lucked
02:54out. Monday is my big prep shopping day. I'll pick everything up that I need for
02:59the week, do about three delivery days per week. Traditionally, deglaze a Genovese
03:05with white wine. I don't have any today, so I'm gonna use some delicious
03:10pachabrito. Just a splash of this goes in.
03:19So the time is 9.15. We're gonna order a courier to pick up the bread, get our
03:25bread from this bakery from across town called Otway Bakery. So originally, I was
03:30driving across town in the Go-4 to pick it up. There's just not enough time to do
03:36that. A wonderful Uber driver who thinks they're picking up package of sorts. It's
03:41gotta make their car smell pretty good, though. I just changed my phone to
03:44Italian because I want to get better at my Italian, so I'm kind of schooling
03:48myself right now. Hey, we got surge. We got surge prices here. I've also baked some
03:53of my own bread in the past. A friend of mine told me, like, there are people out
03:57there who make delicious bread and they're gonna make bread better than you,
04:00so if you can just find those people, it's, you know, it's a win-win for
04:04everyone. So that's kind of one of the things I'm finding is, like, I can't do it
04:08all. It takes about a half hour to be picked up and then dropped off here, so I
04:12like to start making the sandwiches an hour before the first delivery. We're
04:16gonna bring the meat back over here, and then in addition to that, we're gonna add
04:22some chicken stock. It's made Sunday or Monday. Toss in a couple bay leaves, a
04:28touch of salt. This is kind of like the secret ingredient called salsa sica,
04:35which translates to dried sauce. This is from the region of Palermo in Sicily,
04:40where my dad is from. In, like, the scorching August in Sicily, they'll lay
04:45out on tables the passata, and then over a couple days, it dehydrates naturally
04:51from the air and the sun, and you're left with this super, super concentrated
04:57tomato paste that is delicious. I thought, like, maybe I could, you know,
05:03dehydrate a bunch of sauce, but the amount of sauce that you need, there's
05:08just no space for that, and that's gonna just add a whole bunch of depth and
05:12flavor. Everything is just about added, so now we're just gonna let it cook for
05:18about three hours. It's 9.45. We're waiting for the bread to get here, so
05:24we're gonna get started on the pesto in the meantime. First step, of course, is
05:29the basilico, basil. Pesto adds a bit of acid, a bit of brightness to it. It's
05:36about half a garlic. Garlic goes a long way in pesto. I'm gonna add some mint as
05:41well. For this ninja, I had a blender. It definitely, like, helps, especially if
05:47I'm working alone, to even chop a couple of things, so I don't have to be doing
05:52that. We're gonna add one, maybe two, anchovy fillets. This doesn't make the
05:57pesto taste fishy. It just creates a nice, a nice flavor. A bit of pepper, a lot of
06:03olive oil. Right now, I've been using Nostymo olive oil, which is Greek. I
06:07actually found out about them through Salvo's, through making deliveries. I
06:12delivered to a customer. Their family has a grove in Greece. I've been using some of
06:18their olive oil recently. Super delicious.
06:22Well, then we're gonna add pecorino romano, and I like to add a few bread
06:30sticks. This adds a nice crunch to the pesto and to the sandwich.
06:37Well, that's pretty much it. Leave this in the fridge until we're ready to make the
06:42mortadella sandwiches. The time check's about 10 a.m. I'm gonna start thinking
06:48about next week's menu. It's all handwritten and then posted on Instagram.
06:53Most people have found out about Salvo's through Instagram. I'll post something
06:58the week of, and I'll announce a menu. People can send their pre-orders for the
07:03day that they select. I think I want to do next week, prosciutto, mozzarella, and
07:09marinated peppers. After the mortadella, it seems like the prosciutto is sort of a
07:14fan favorite. So this sandwich has reappeared in a few different versions, the
07:18prosciutto kind of being the main ingredient. So that would be for Wednesday,
07:22I'm thinking, and then for Thursday, I think a Sicilian-style tuna salad would be
07:28nice, especially as the weather's getting warmer. I do this labor-intensive
07:32handwritten menus because it feels really, really warm and friendly. If I'm
07:37nerding out, this is, like, letters inspired by my father's handwriting. So I
07:42tried replicating, yeah, his handwriting a bit. I'm gonna check bread arrival time,
07:47and it looks like they're right out front. So we're gonna grab our bread. Yeah,
07:51they're right out front. Hey, how's it going? Thank you. Have a nice day. Cool.
07:59We got our fresh bread baked not even an hour ago. They delivered ciabatta for
08:09today. The ciabatta is my absolute favorite, especially for panini. Huge open pockets,
08:15absorbed olive oil, in this case a pesto. It's super light and soft on the inside,
08:19crusty on the outside, exactly what you want. I have listed that there's a stock of 20 of each
08:25sandwich, so that kind of helps me keep track of how much I need to buy, how much I need to cook,
08:32and there's no food waste because I know everything is being sold. Here's a list
08:36of orders that need to go out today. We have quite a bit today.
08:41So it's 10.45. We have a dozen mortadella panini to make today. Cut our bread,
08:47toss in some mortadella, our pesto, mozzarella di bufala imported from Campania. The most
08:53delicious mozzarella comes from this region of Italy. I remember the first time I tried it was
08:59in a gas station in Italy. After we arrived from the airport, we were driving back to
09:04my uncle's house where we were staying, and we stopped. That was like the first stop we had to
09:09hit. It's delicious stuff. It was a dream of mine to have a deli slicer in my own kitchen.
09:16Here we have freshly sliced mozzarella. Next thing after the basil, I want to add
09:24the mozzarella. It's beautiful, super creamy.
09:34Add grated parmesan,
09:38and then finish it off with a bit of our lemon zest.
09:46That's one panino finished. We have just 11 left. This like deli-style folding took me a while to
09:54to learn. Cut it here,
10:00and then a secondary.
10:03And this blue tape was like one of the first ideas I had. The color of Napoli, where my mom's from.
10:08This was just like a simple homage, and it like quickly became synonymous with salvos, which is
10:14kind of cool, the blue tape. And then into the cooler it goes, and then we do the whole thing
10:18over again.
10:23It's noon. The Genovese has finally ended cooking, so it's time to build our second sandwich. First
10:29thing we're going to do, take some of the carrot and onion and kind of cook it down in the skillet
10:35so it becomes a little thicker. The longer we cook it, the creamier it gets. I want it to have the
10:40consistency of a jam. So for the Genovese sandwich, the star is obviously our meat, and then
10:48our carrot and onion jam. And then for cheese, I'm thinking fior di sardegna, sheep's milk
10:56cheese. It's slightly sharp, very creamy. It's always like a little puzzle,
11:04figuring out where everything goes. It's all here though. Our jam is ready to go. I'm just going to
11:10add a touch of honey for added sweetness. First we add a little bit of our jam. Next goes our
11:21slices of Genovese, and then our fior di sardegna. Finish it off.
11:33Another in the cooler. It was my dad's when he was working as a laborer.
11:38Luckily we have the same name, so it says Salvatore, so that's pretty cool.
11:45It's 12 30. Done with the sandwiches. They're all packed up. It's time to
11:49load them in the Gophor. This crazy thing is a 2013 Gophor Interceptor. I bought it off of
11:57some mechanic in Greenpoint. It's essentially a scooter with a roof on it, so it keeps me warm
12:03in the wintertime. It keeps me dry on rainy days. This does not go on the highway. It reaches a max
12:09of 40 miles an hour, and when it does, it just like shakes a bunch. It becomes scary real quick,
12:16and it I think makes a lot of people happy seeing it in the street. A loud, fun,
12:21strange machine. Time to make our deliveries.
12:23Our first stop is in Bed-Stuy.
12:34The Gophor is a pretty good cheat code riding around in New York City. You can kind of fit it
12:42anywhere. You can park it anywhere. When you're riding down one-way streets and the road could
12:47be blocked off by a garbage truck or something, the Gophor can usually squeeze by pretty easily.
12:53Since I started doing the deliveries on my bicycle, I pretty much knew a lot of the roads,
12:58a lot of the streets, a lot of the cross streets, especially in Brooklyn
13:03and Queens. It's pretty cool. A lot of that is still memorized. I use a lot of those routes.
13:09All right, we're coming up to our delivery.
13:14Um, any second. Hey, what's up?
13:19Here's your mortadella. And then I have, do you like pasta fagioli? Yeah. Yeah,
13:24I have pasta fagioli here. Enjoy. Thanks so much. Thank you. Yeah. Sweet. The next spot
13:29we're heading to is Rita Maria. It's a cafe in Bed-Stuy. I actually became pretty good
13:35friends with them. They're awesome people. A lot of the times pop up there. So I host
13:40these dinner pop-ups. It's usually Sunday suppers. Lunches are a lot of fun, but there's a whole
13:46other opportunities when it comes to making dinners. So at Rita Maria, you know, they gave
13:51me a sort of a venue. I think the most rewarding part about running Salvos is making people happy.
13:57It's also like how I show that I care, cooking food and feeding people. And it's just really
14:03nice for that to be reciprocated and people to understand that food is important. Food is,
14:08food is happy. Food is fun. Thank you so much for following me today. I got a few more deliveries
14:14to make, so I'll see you later.