Twenty-five years
at the same counter.
One family.

Chapter One · The Brothers

Some shops are a job.
This one is a surname.

For more than twenty-five years the Cioffi brothers have stood behind the same counter in Burnaby Heights, slicing prosciutto and cutting cheese from the wheel for a crowd that comes from across the city. The shop carries the family name, and it shows in the way it is run — the regulars are greeted, the orders remembered, the imports chosen by people who actually eat them.

It is, at heart, two trades under one roof: an Italian butcher and a European deli. The salumi and the fresh-cut meats on one side; the cheese, olives, fresh pasta and the long back wall of imported pantry goods on the other. Put together, it is the kind of place where you arrive for one thing and leave with a full basket.

Chapter Two · What's On The Counter

Imported, cured, cut to order.

A European deli counter is a study in abundance — the deep red of cured salumi beside the pale gold of aged cheese, bowls of glossy marinated olives, fresh pasta and the back-wall shelves of oil and tomatoes carried in from Italy. Below, a few of the things the cases tend to hold. Photographs are stock placeholders; the family would supply its own.