In downtown Santa Cruz, there is a delicatessen called Zoccoli's.
It's a smallish place, with tables on the sidewalk in front of the store (nice wide sidewalks in Santa Cruz) and a few tables inside. Busy! Many, many people eat there or purchase food there every day, all day. When you walk in the door, the smell of baking bread lifts you from your feet and wafts you all over the store to look at the wines, the teas, the deli case. The menu boards are on the wall behind the counter, and any time you are at Zoccoli's, you'll see people just standing back, reading them.
Their sandwiches are wonderful, their lasagna is great, but what I always HAVE to buy is their feta vegetable salad.
Those of you who have read the novel Time Traveler are now thinking, "Oh, wait, this sounds familiar ... "
And it should be. I renamed the deli "Giammarino's" and placed it in the city of Port Laughton instead of Santa Cruz, but the descriptions are pretty much from the life. Bernie and I laugh when we talk about that delicatessen, because we have a hard time remembering the real name of it, and refer to it as "Giammarino's" instead. (I remembered the real name after having a look at my collection of business cards from hither and thither.) When we go to Santa Cruz for a weekend, we always go to Giammarino's -- whoops, Zoccoli's -- to stock up on their tasty food as soon as we've got the suitcase in the hotel room. (And we look to see if a certain character is sitting there, reading a newspaper while he waits for his sandwich ... )
Today, perhaps inspired by his thumb-through of the newly delivered copies of Time Traveler, Bernie was cruel enough to speculate on the feta vegetable salad tossed with farfalle pasta. Now I can't get the thought out of my head.
Guaranteed, that suggestion is going to cost him a pretty penny when I show him when on the calendar we can get away to Santa Cruz!
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