Who does the culinary world trust more than the late Anthony Bourdain? His uncompromising honesty, integrity, and obsession with food led him to be not only one of the most respected figures in the food world but the most adored. He found a simplistic way to enjoy life, each and every minute of it. Lucky for us, he shared that philosophy with the world through his writing and on screen. As he told the camera during an episode of "No Reservations" while sipping an espresso on the streets of Paris, "Eat a ham sandwich. Really eat a ham sandwich."
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A Box Full of Yum
Salumi is a Seattle staple for cured meats and tasty sammies. Now you don’t have to stand in line. Order a box of goodness from Coro by Salumi, and send a favorite friend some tasty salami.
]]>For more than 20 years, the renowned Salumi has been cranking out cured meats in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. Curated by two Seattle women, Clara Veniard and Martinique Grigg, the female-led operation handcrafts Coro by Salumi cured meat and salami using sustainable sourcing and new world flavors.
Utilizing all-natural ingredients including thoughtfully-sourced spices and humanely treated vegetarian-fed pork never treated with antibiotics, spruce up your holiday charcuterie boards with their sample packs and limited edition holiday boxes.
Inside, nosh on boxes of four salamis, including lemongrass with a touch of cumin, classic with garlic and ginger, molé with cocoa and cinnamon, agrumi with cardamom and orange and finocchiona with curry, black pepper and fennel.
Bring on the apps! Clara Veniard and Martinique Grigg, owners of Coro Foods and Salumi deli, make up a certified woman-owned company (the only such salami company in the U.S). For 20-plus years Salumi has been delighting Seattleites with its cured meats mixing "old-world techniques with modern thinking, new world flavors and a belief that eating well is what we live for." Coro by Salumi features tried-and-true recipes, and gift boxes show off unique and unforgettable flavors like Lemongrass, Molé with Cocoa & Cinnamon and Agrumi with Cardamom & Orange.
]]>When it comes to holiday shopping, sometimes the getting started is the hardest part. Worry not, we did the heavy lifting for you, gathering lovely things from all the corners of the city to bring you one big inspirational buying guide. Behold, and get out those wallets.
]]>Salumi is Italian for deli meats. And Coro is Italian for chorus. Put 'em together and have Coro, a restaurant and deli offering the most fabulous cured meats. Using the old world methods, new world thinking and new world spices, Martinique Grigg and Clara Veniard picked up the tradition in Seattle begun by Armandino and Marilyn Batali and have grown it to the stellar establishment it has become. Part of the incentive was to show that two women and also mothers could start and grow a specialty food business, and they have succeeded. Their philosophy is that good food is what we live for and they have done so much to share that philosophy with others. Salumi is an art, not a science. It is practiced differently in different parts of Italy, and the founder Armandino learned his technique from a certain area in Italy and brought it to Seattle. In taking over the business, Martinique and Clara were nervous about changing an institution without losing the magic that made it famous, but gradually they learned the formula for keeping a beloved name alive while updating it and keeping it going.
]]>I’ve known great sandwiches. I used to thrill to the cheese steaks they served at Buzzy’s in Boston, next to the Charles Street Jail. They wept with fat and flavor, an amalgam of bread and cheese and salty meat. I still marvel at the hot pastrami on rye at Langer’s in Los Angeles, which Nora Ephron called the finest hot pastrami sandwich in the world. I’ve devoured heroes at Lioni in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn: capicola, prosciutto, olive loaf, fresh mozzarella, chopped tomatoes, a little drizzle of balsamic. That’s “a well-trained hero,” according to the restaurant’s menu. The owners call it the Angelo Dundee. I love a Nicky Special at Defonte’s in Red Hook, heavy on the fried eggplant, extra hot salad on top. Also a porchetta sandwich at Salumi, in Seattle, and a roast beef po’ boy at Parkway in New Orleans. New Jersey sloppy joes! Iowa tenderloins! Pit beef on a hard roll! Fried grouper on a soft one! All my friends.
These sandwiches are mostly, as Ephron once wrote of pastrami, “not something anyone’s mother whips up and serves at home.” I’ve tried to make the porchetta from Salumi, for instance, and put myself in the position of an amateur lead guitarist in a White Stripes cover band that doesn’t get a second gig. But there are times when you can try, and be rewarded, if only you choose the right target.
These 336 food & drink crafters from 45 states, D.C. and Guam represent the nation’s best in tasty, responsible fare
The Good Food Foundation is proud to announce the 338 outstanding food and drink crafters that are in the running for a 2021 Good Food Award. Rising to the top amongst 1,928 entries in 16 categories, these farmers and food crafters are leading the way in quality, sustainability and socially responsible production. With average weekly grocery spending up 17% year over year, and more people seeking to support local, resilient food systems, buying from Good Food Awards Finalists offer a delicious way to align action with intention.
]]>The kitchen has become a refuge for many this year — even if it’s just a place for a strong cocktail. So this Christmas and Hanukkah, spoil your loved ones with gifts for cooks, bakers and lovers of fine food and drink. Here are our picks for the top foodie gifts for the 2020 holiday season, with a special eye toward makers with a tie to Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.
Share local favorite Salumi’s outstanding salami with this pack that includes flavors of mole, cardamom and orange, curry and fennel and more. $50 at Whole Foods and corofoods.com
Salumi is a legendary Seattle sandwich shop and cured meat emporium, headed by Principal Salumist (that's a real title) Armandino Batali. He's otherwise known as Mario Batali's dad. Armandino retired from Boeing at age 58 to focus on meat. I never tasted his planes but I think it was a good decision.
Armandino Batali is holding court at Salumi, just like in the old days, but today there’s a white wine in his hand. A woman in her early 40s with an outdoorsy radiance approaches him with a plate. It’s not heaped with Salumi’s signature salami, perked with ginger and almost kaleidoscopic flecks of fat. But rather, chocolate chip cookies.
“They’re made with our pancetta,” she tells the octogenarian who founded this hallowed Italian deli two decades ago. “Well, it’s your pancetta, really!”
At its grand opening party Salumi’s new location doesn’t look so very different from its past life as Rain Shadow Meats Squared: brighter lights, shelves of tasteful merch, coolers of takeaway sandwiches where rib eyes and pork shoulders used to be. It’s three blocks and an era away from the shotgun storefront where Armandino, after retirement from Boeing, first unleashed his cured meats and porchetta upon Seattle in 1999.
He hung up his butcher’s apron long ago and handed operations off to his daughter, Gina, and her husband, Brian D’Amato, back in 2007. A decade later, they too dreamt of retirement, but lacked the sort of long-term growth plans potential buyers required.
“We worked our butts off—so hard, we didn’t really look forward,” says Gina Batali. And yet she and Brian, Salumi’s curer-in-chief, could never produce enough to meet demand.
A mutual acquaintance connected her with Clara Veniard and Martinique Grigg (she of the proffered cookie plate). Over covert coffees at Grand Central, she learned the two friends were huge Salumi fans, not to mention Harvard MBAs and fellow food lovers looking to buy a business together. Also, “they’re both moms,” notes Gina, a proprietor known to pause midlunch rush to hug a regular’s new baby.
She liked the idea of her family’s carefully crafted product being accessible to more people, but also sought the sort of new owners who would retain the deli side of the business, and its longtime employees.
In October 2017, Veniard and Grigg signed papers, donned hairnets, and immersed themselves in the world of grinds and fermentation. Suddenly this Seattle institution—homespun right down to Gina’s mother, Marilyn, making gnocchi in the shop’s front window—had performance reviews and co-CEOs who work with an executive coach.
But Salumi’s new paradigm feels rooted in genuine fandom. When Grigg noticed a “for lease” sign in Rain Shadow Meats Squared’s former window, she knew the timing made no sense—they were readying a huge production facility in Kent, with the potential to double Salumi’s production and then some. “But this was pretty much the only space where we could maintain the essence of Salumi and stay in Pioneer Square,” says Grigg. “We had to do it.” Shortly after this past Thanksgiving, Salumi’s new owners upped the ante on Gina’s wish.
Asign at the door issues crisp and immediate instructions: Veer left for the register dedicated to speedy prewrapped cold sandwiches. Right to order off the menu. Veniard’s long dark ponytail is visible behind the counter; she’s probably the only member of her Harvard MBA class working a cash register today.
Salumi’s menu also received an efficiency makeover, which admittedly reduces the frustration of being stuck in line behind some indecisive visitor who saw this place on a Travel Channel rerun. The original breadth of options remains, but a curated roster of sandwiches supersedes the old series of choose-your-own-adventure chalkboard lists. Salumi veteran Nancy Karis helped determine optimal combos: classics, like spicy mole salami with the cooling properties of fresh mozzarella, plus a few newcomers like the Toscana, which adds a swipe of goat cheese, and a vaguely California vibe to layers of fennel-rich finocchiona salami and a chunky fennel salsa.
“Some people like the charm of that,” Grigg says of the Disneyland-level wait times of Salumi days of yore. She says the new space sees even more customers, but on four separate visits, I have a sandwich in hand within about 10 minutes.
The porchetta is still sloppy and unctuous, fennel flavors unmistakable even in meat that’s roasted into shredded submission. It’s still stuffed into chewy Macrina rolls the size of a handbag. After all, it’s the same recipes, and the same staff members lined up in this larger, shinier workspace, hoisting the famed fist-size meatballs from the heated vessel filled with sauce so deep red it borders on burgundy. It was hard to share those family recipes, Gina confesses, particularly her grandmother Leonetta’s meatballs. She stayed on for a bit to help with the deli. During the transition, she says, “I carried my fork around and, you know, it just has to be the same or I don’t really want to be around it.”
The board of daily specials hangs beneath the register, but the more streamlined menu above lets your gaze linger here longer, especially on Salumi’s rotating soups, woefully underheralded bowls like a chowder of potato and kale with shreds of mole salami, or smoky tomato that’s every bit as spiced and savory as carefully cured meat.
Love for Salumi has always been a funny alchemy of food and story. The paper-wrapped sandwich as a badge of honor that proclaims, I survived that wait. Word that the family of celebrity chef Mario Batali runs a Seattle sandwich shop (that fun fact became distinctly less fun after some prominent #MeToo accusations).
And the story evolves.
A basic chop salad crept onto the menu over the summer but another new arrival, that pancetta chocolate chip cookie, had to wait until Seattle’s Italian mainstay moved into its larger kitchen. Though their inspiration is more NYC’s millennial-hip Milk Bar than anybody’s nonna, the cookies have a homemade look to them, with irregular golden edges and haphazard scatters of bacon.
“I never would have thought of this in a thousand years,” Armandino Batali said when he sampled one at the grand opening. “I like it,” he added after a thoughtful chew. Still, “I hope they always serve soup.”
]]>I hold no grudge against grain bowls, but for lunch or a bite on the go, the old-school sandwich is better, no? It’s transportable, simple in its construct — meat between bread, interior moist with a sauce, preferably mayo. Here are the four best sandwiches I’ve eaten this month.
And speaking of porchetta, I always envision some corner rosticceria in Rome every time I spot a downtown office worker biting into that Salumi pork sandwich along the cobblestone streets in Pioneer Square. Salumi does a 16-hour roasted pork, scented with fennel and garlic. That, along with pickled and sweet onions and green peppers, gets tucked into the pocket of a ciabatta that’s been slit like a pita. This $12 sandwich is better than Salumi’s popular meatball sub.
]]>FEW RESTAURANTS ARE steeped in lore like this sandwich counter in Pioneer Square. And it is a great story: When Armandino Batali retired after 31 years in quality control with Boeing, he didn’t take up golf—he took up cured meat. He studied charcuterie, then opened Salumi in 1999, preserving his ancestry’s meaty traditions across from the place where his grandfather, Angelo Merlino, once ran the Italian grocery that became Merlino Foods.
Salumi’s lore began with that shift from engineering to sandwich slinging, but consider the meticulously varied grinds of pork and fat that give each salami that kaleidoscopic speckle, or the prized culatello that hang for nine months in a precise prescription of temperature and humidity: quality control and preserving tradition are two different ways of saying the same thing.
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Join your Instagram hosts @nelson_eats and @monybseattle for the latest on the Seattle food scene, the influencers behind it, and the businesses who keep us coming back for more and hear them celebrate Coro 4 packs are great for gifts, game day or just an easy snack.
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