Melbourne Italian deli gets new owner, but keeps flavor that made it popular

Late on a Saturday morning they stream through the door of Cerrato’s Italian Market and Deli, as always, to decide on take-outs or patiently wait for tables. Some exchange brief pleasantries with other customers, who they recognize from countless previous visits.

Most call greetings to Arsenio Lobosco, and on this day, his last as owner of the restaurant he established 13 years ago in the little strip center on New Haven Avenue in Melbourne, they are especially sentimental.

“You better come back!” hollers a man in a voice nearly as Manhattan-tinged as Lobosco’s.

“Arsenio is Cerrato’s,” a woman says softly.

Perhaps, but after a half century in the food business, starting in New York and then North Carolina before he ended up in Melbourne, it is time for Lobosco to rest a little. Having sold the business, he will travel to Italy and spend a little time in New York before he returns in October.

“Cerrato’s will be what it is,” he says.

What Cerrato’s is is unique in this area, an unassuming little neighborhood deli such as you’d find in Brooklyn or The Bronx, with some of the usual meats as well as the imported salumi you want here: prosciutto, mortadella, sopressata, capocollo. He has the cheeses to go with them too, some made on-premises, and homemade sfogliatelle and cookies. The cooler has the sodas you’d find in The City too; the opposite wall, products that range from pasta to gadgets.

Most of all, Cerrato’s has people, and they happily jam the place as they do every other day, and if they are especially social, it is because Lobosco has encouraged it, addressing diners by name as he delivers this pasta dish or that sandwich. Sandwiches here are locally legendary because of the amount of meat you get, sometimes piled under veritable slabs of cheese, served on bread he has baked.

“Yeah, I knew what you wanted because you always order the same thing,” he kids a customer as he slides a monstrous meatball Parmigiana sub onto a little table, and his faithful assistant, pigtailed Tricia Tullis, nods.

New Yorkers know that every neighborhood, every family, has its own style of preparing Italian-American fare, and this is Lobosco’s.

“I was born in Italy, near Naples, and I grew up in Manhattan, in Spanish Harlem,” he says. “We lived in Brooklyn and Queens too, and I’ve always been in the food business, restaurants and delis.”

That took him to Tennessee and North Carolina, and at one of his stops, he met Fred Cerrato, who “taught me a lot.” After he moved from Asheville to Melbourne, he was determined to own his own deli at last, and he named it after his friend and mentor, however much it is entirely Lobosco.

The men thought of doing a pizzeria, but having seen the numbers of pizza joints in the area, settled on a deli, because there were none, and they would take it seriously.

“You’ve got to really put your love into this business, and when you own a restaurant, you’ve got to be here for the people. It’s yours, a piece of yourself,” he says.

He adds that the secret to Cerrato’s success probably are those crisp-surfaced, pillowy inside loaves: “It’s all about the bread, and that tradition will continue, and it’s always quality before quantity, with bread or anything else.”

Said quality will continue under new owner Michael Mauro, he adds, calls the man to join him and magic, another outgoing New Yorker. Mauro is not unfamiliar to Brevardians, being owner of the Burger Inn, Melbourne’s throwback drive-in, which now is in the care of Mauro’s children, who have worked there for years.

“This is my heritage,” Mauro says, and laughs. “Growing up, every Sunday, there was a pasta dinner. ... I couldn’t let this place go down, and on our first day, I called my mother and told her what I’d done, and that now I get to do (those Sunday dinners) every day. She said I better keep it as it is, do everything the right way.”

He promises nothing will change, including Tullis; that the recipes will remain the same, the bread will be baked on-site, the pasta dishes will have their familiar flavors and textures. Mauro also wants the deli to have the same neighborhood atmosphere, “where all types of people can come in and have a great lunch.”

Restaurant review: Looking for a great meatball sandwich? Find it at Cerrato's in Melbourne

Local though it may be, Cerrato’s also is a favorite with the likes of Northrop-Grumman and L3Harris, to whom Lobosco says he is grateful. That it will maintain quality will be seen to by Lobosco, who, not surprisingly, will not let it go completely, but after October, when he returns, will “drop in from time to time” and lend a hand with Cerrato’s thriving holiday catering business.

“Cerrato’s will be what Cerrato’s is, and I only live around the corner,” he says. “I’m just taking a little break.”

Cerrato's Italian Market and Deli is at 908 W. New Haven Ave., Melbourne.

Dowling is a Suntree-based freelance food and lifestyles writer. Join the conversation at facebook.com/groups/321flavor:WhereBrevardEats.

This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Cerrato's deli in Melbourne gets new owner, but keeps neighborhood feel