When I want to feel closer to my late grandmother — and to my great-aunt, aunts and cousins — I drive to Burbank. I head directly to the cookie case at Monte Carlo Italian Deli, passing beneath the wooden puppets that line the walls, and scan the rows of sweets for pignoli. I wander the aisles, still dumbstruck after all these decades: the countless jars of giardiniera, every twist and shape of dried pasta on offer, the familiar buzz of customers around the deli case all waiting for their number to be called.
By my count at least four generations of the Petrucelli line, by blood or by marriage, have loved shopping here, where retro neon signage welcomes you to a cornucopia of Italian excellence. On one side of the building is Monte Carlo, a well-stocked market and importer, and on the other, Pinocchio’s: what feels like the last vestige of 1960s red-sauce, cafeteria-style dining.
It’s a relic and a palace, built of sausage links, frozen manicotti, gasoline-like canisters of olive oil and a confounding Pinocchio theme. It should be made a local landmark and protected for as long as Los Angeles remains standing.
Informed by her New Jersey-born mother-in-law, in the ’90s my own mother would cart me along to the deli, where the staff would gift me and every child a long, spindly breadstick, as is still their tradition. In adolescence I would line up at Pinocchio’s and pick out affordably priced wedges of lasagna and eggplant parmesan or the house-made Italian sausages with wilted green peppers over pasta, always served on muted pink cafeteria trays, and always with my favorite side dish: the tart marinated mushrooms, boiled in vinegar then coated in oil and flecked with spices.
Now in adulthood, it’s where I find solace and connection to my family. Sometimes I’ll meet my cousin Victoria, sipping sub-$5 glasses of wine and sliding into well-worn leather booths in one of the brick- or wood-accented dining rooms. Now expecting her own child — who’ll undoubtedly become the fifth generation of our family to fall in love with this magical market — she asks me to send photos of the heaps of garlic bread when unable to muster the strength for her own visit. She doesn’t know it yet, but I’ll be stopping by for that garlic bread on the way to her baby shower in a few weeks.
The legacy of shopping at Monte Carlo isn’t limited to the Petrucellis. According to co-owner Tony Scuticchio, many of the customers here are multigenerational; he’s seen children grow up and begin their own lineage.
He estimates 80% of his patrons live in the San Fernando Valley, but some make the pilgrimage from Las Vegas to shop four or five times a year, while others come from Palm Springs whenever they’re in town.
“The customers make it so pleasant,” he says. “They’re so appreciative and they love it. We have a lot of Italians that come in here, old-school Italians, and they even go back to, ‘When I was in Italy, we did this,’ ‘When I was in Italy, I did that.’”
It’s been a family affair since 1969, when Croatia-born Mark Brankovich Sr. purchased the 1950s-founded Monte Carlo deli. Though not himself Italian, “He always felt that he was more Italian than the Italians were,” Scuticchio says with a laugh. Brankovich spoke Italian, and lived in Italy during World War II; at one point, the family lore goes, he was arrested by Mussolini’s troops, then released after his uncle called in a favor. After moving to the U.S., he never returned. But he did buy an Italian deli along Magnolia Boulevard.
In 1971 he also purchased the adjacent liquor store, flipping that into Pinocchio’s, and eventually bought the next-door bar to expand his dining room. When he died in 2001, his daughter, Laura, took the reins, and not long after that, she fell in love with Scuticchio, who operates the business.
Scuticchio had owned his own grocery stores in Los Angeles and his own father — born in Italy — operated restaurants at the Santa Monica Pier in the 1960s. Sliding in to take over the deli was, he felt, right in line with his own work experience and heritage. Now he and Laura have a 19-year-old daughter who has helped scoop the gelato through the years.
Their kitchen whips up 2,500 meatballs and between 3,000 and 4,000 sausages every week, plus 80 gallons of meat sauce and 30 gallons of the marinara each day. Preparation begins at 7 a.m. daily. The bread is made freshly for the deli around the corner, by a bakery that the deli used to also own.
But no time is as busy as the holidays, when the deli hums from morning to night.
“Christmastime is so busy because everybody gets back to their roots,” Scuticchio says. “You have people that say, ‘My grandmother used to make lasagna,’ or ‘My grandmother used to make these raviolis,’ ‘My grandmother used to make manicotti.’ Everybody just gets back to what their family has done. So I think that’s really unique.”
Some form of stuffed pasta in red sauce can be found on my own family’s table, be it Christmas, Thanksgiving or Easter. A few years ago I placed a call to my Aunt Carol, who was organizing the holiday feast; I was heading to Burbank anyway, and would she like me to pick up anything from Monte Carlo for the dinner?
No need, she told me. She’d already made the trip for frozen ravioli the day before.
Monte Carlo Italian Deli and Pinocchio’s are at 3103 W. Magnolia Blvd. in Burbank.
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