- May 9, 2024
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Run by the original owners of A&L Meats, Larry’s Italian Deli has relocated and expanded.
When Larry DeCamillo and his wife, Lillian, reopened a local sandwich shop in 2009, called Larry’s Italian Deli on 4750 E. Moody Blvd., they barely advertised. They published a caricature of Larry, which his daughter drew, next to a blurb in a small ad, which read: “Larry’s back!”
That was all. And that was all they needed.
In no time, the phones were ringing. “Larry, is that really you?” people would ask. “Are you still going to have roast pork on Tuesdays?”
Residents remembered him from nearly 20 years prior, when he and Lillian opened A&L Meats in the Palm Harbor Shopping Center, in 1984.
Aside from the addition of Cubans and wraps, their current menu is exactly the same as it was when they sold A&L a decade-and-a-half ago.
“Because of my reputation from A&L, I had a good base,” Larry said, sitting in the dining room of his new deli, at 2405 E. Moody Blvd., a mile down the road from the one he opened in 2009. The location is double the size of his previous store, which sat 12 and was 1,000 square feet.
“I’ve been in food all my life,” he said. At 12, he worked in his father’s butcher shop. After selling A&L in 1996, he started for worldwide contract feeder Compass, and ran cafeterias in business buildings, retirement homes and halfway houses. He worked with Meals on Wheels, and helped Benvenuto’s Pizza & Sub — currently operating as Joseph’s Bistro in Flagler Beach — as well as the succeeding owners of A&L, get their businesses off the ground.
Lillian also worked for U.S. Foodservice for eight years.
Larry got back into the sandwich game after being laid off, which he saw as a blessing in disguise. Ever since selling A&L, he’d always missed the customers, and as a diabetic, corporate stress was getting to him.
Entrepreneurial stress, however, is more manageable.
“It’s a good stress,” he said of running a restaurant. “It’s, ‘When am I going to make the next 100 pounds of sausage?’”
Larry whips up 100 or more pounds of sausage — his most popular menu item — once or twice a week. He made 80 pounds on Wednesday, Oct. 5, he said, two days after opening the new location. He planned to make another 80 pounds Saturday, Oct. 8.
“I try to make this as true to a New York deli as it can be,” he said, motioning toward a freezer where he keeps 60-odd frozen meals, a family of marsalas, parmigianas and cacciatores. His frozen options are what he’s most proud of, he says, citing one of his customers who in the 1990s was an A&L regular with his wife. Now a widower, the man asks Larry to call whenever he’s making meals to freeze so that he can come in before they’re frozen, bring them home and divide them into individual meals for the week.
“I don’t know what it is,” Larry said, about the following he has built in Flagler. “It’s personality. It’s family-oriented. My wife and I love people. It’s disposition … The customers come first.”
He refers to those who frequent his Bunnell store as “second-generation” customers. A lot of them used to come in with their parents when they were small, or with their wives when they were younger. So many of them look familiar.
“I love to feed people,” he said, smiling. “There’s a satisfaction to it — maybe because I love to eat … It’s good to be back in business.”
For more, call 437-2727.
