{"id":51399,"date":"2025-11-18T16:53:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T16:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/51399\/"},"modified":"2025-11-18T16:53:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T16:53:09","slug":"the-worst-kept-holiday-secret-in-florida-is-this-incredible-emporium-of-italian-food-garden-gun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/51399\/","title":{"rendered":"The Worst-Kept Holiday Secret in Florida Is This Incredible Emporium of Italian Food \u2013 Garden & Gun"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mazzaro\u2019s Italian Market<\/a> covers an entire block of 22nd Avenue in St. Petersburg, Florida, and each year, its\u00a0fervent fans mark their calendars for its sumptuous holiday food\u2014chocolate-covered strawberries for Valentine\u2019s Day, breads and fruit-studded pastries for Easter, butternut squash arancini appetizers for Thanksgiving. But nothing compares to the Christmas scene at the 1993-opened fine food market.<\/p>\n

A big cheese literally kicks off the season. \u201cWe get a 950- to 1,000-pound loaf of Auricchio Stravecchio, a very aged, very sharp provolone,\u201d manager Rob Smith says. \u201cWe\u2019re told it\u2019s the biggest one imported into the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"cheese<\/p>\n

Photo: Rodrigo Mendez<\/p>\n

Cheese at Mazzaro\u2019s.<\/p>\n

This year, the ceremony of wheeling out and cutting the cheese takes place on December 3, when a team of cheesemongers and managers will slice the black-wrapped, rope-strapped log into wheels and hundreds of crumbly samples using a custom knife made by a loyal customer. \u201cHe\u2019s a knife-maker from Italy,\u201d Smith explains. \u201cHe came to the cheese-cutting last year and realized our knives weren\u2019t long enough, so he made us one.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Every year, devotees show up to watch, kibbitz, and then head indoors to shop for wine, specialty meats, seafood, housemade pastas, coffee beans roasted on-site, and every Italian sweet imaginable. For the holidays, the shelves overflow with Christmas cake, pandoro sweet bread, and cookies. \u201cLots of cookies,\u201d Smith emphasizes. \u201cThumbprints, wedding cookies, wine biscuits, snowballs, red and green sugar cookies\u2014everybody loves them.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the week before Christmas, Mazzaro\u2019s opens its doors every day at 9:00 a.m. to a line of three hundred to four hundred, Smith estimates. But no one seems to mind the wait: Everyone\u2019s chatting, and some are chatting in Italian, he says. \u201cYou\u2019ll be standing in line for a sandwich with the guy who drives a garbage truck, pro baseball players like the Tampa Bay Rays, Catholic priests, TV actors, people from ten different countries. We get a lot of local law enforcement. At lunchtime this is the safest place in town.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Mazzaro\u2019s<\/p>\n

Photo: Rodrigo Mendez<\/p>\n

Mazzaro\u2019s deli.<\/p>\n

Before or after filling their baskets, many customers order lunch from the deli to eat on the patio: maybe a Hot Italian sandwich and a cup of Italian wedding soup. (Pro tip: Take a number and know what you want when it\u2019s called to keep things friendly.) And all day, about a dozen people will be sitting on stools at the coffee counter, drinking espresso and eating pastries.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt Christmas season, it\u2019s organized mayhem,\u201d Smith says. \u201cEveryone\u2019s on a mission to get something special for their holiday, whether it\u2019s homemade pierogies, ravioli, fish for the Feast of the Seven Fishes, or the homemade gelati\u2026and pretty much everyone gets a panettone. This time of year, we have three people just making lasagnas all day long. The week before Christmas, we\u2019ll make 4,200 lasagnas.\u201d<\/p>\n

One niche that\u2019s tucked near the deli and opposite the wine cave\u00a0is full of religious statues, saints draped with rosaries, silver charms, mysterious little mementos, and a pine cone. Smith points at the pine cone in the shrine but doesn\u2019t touch it. \u201cSomeone put it there, probably with a special prayer, so we don\u2019t remove it,\u201d he says. \u201cWe respect that. And those statues are protecting us. Not a week goes by that I don\u2019t have to say, \u2018The statues are not for sale.\u2019\u201d Fortunately, the edible bounty is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mazzaro\u2019s Italian Market covers an entire block of 22nd Avenue in St. Petersburg, Florida, and each year, its\u00a0fervent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51400,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[32505,28,4451,202,204,203,199,201,200,32506],"class_list":["post-51399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-arts-culture","tag-florida","tag-food-drink","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news","tag-whats-new"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}