My friend Jack Silbert texted me the other day with the sad news that John Amato of Hoboken died at the age of 88 on August 30. Mr. Amato played an interesting role in my childhood and later life.
He was the Hoboken cheese man!
From behind the counter of his delicatessen, Fiore’s, 414 Adams Street, he sold some superb, legendary handmade mozzarella, a.k.a. “mutz.”
When we were kids, my father would take us to run brief business errands in New York City, or elsewhere in Passaic or Hudson counties, New Jersey, then cut work early and make a beeline for Hoboken to pick up a couple of twists of mozzarella that he would take home for us to enjoy with whatever my mother was cooking. Or we would get prosciutto and mozzarella sandwiches that we would eat almost immediately upon arrival at home.
Much as we loved this ritual and the infusion of fresh mozzarella on our table at home, my parents both viewed these delicacies as a once-in-a-while thing because a) we ate it so fast b) my mother was always fretting about calories, and c) fresh mutz was frankly expensive.
Mr. Amato actually had a sign behind the counter that addressed this fact head-on:
“The taste of a fresh mozzarella is remembered long after the price is forgotten.”
I’ve told this story numerous times, probably most famously in a New York Times article that I wrote back in the 1990s when I was writing for the newspaper and living in Hoboken. At the time, it was a thrill for me to interview the man who had served up cheese to my family over the years. He was a soft-spoken man with a sweet smile and a sandy voice. His passing was marked by several articles and tributes.
I lived in the ‘Boke (or the Hobes, or whatever you want to call it) for about a decade. As an adult with decent pocket money and a ferocious hunger for sandwiches, visiting Fiore’s went from being a once-in-a-while thing to a delightful, weekly indulgence that I experienced with Jack.
Typically, we’d go on Saturdays to pick up a prosciutto and mozzarella sandwich, or experiment with the Thursday special, the roast beef and gravy with mozzarella sandwich. They were always nothing short of amazing.
I lived in Italy for one year following my marriage in 2003. No one in Il Bel Paese ever sold a panino thickly stuffed with roast beef and gravy with mozzarella. Such a concoction is not Italian but Italian American. It was and is an absolutely delicious sandwich, but I will always be partial to the prosciutto and mozzarella sandwich that I enjoyed as a kid. But hey, you have to change it up, right?
Fiore’s fame seemed to grow long after I left town. During the run of the hit HBO series, The Sopranos, the Furio Giunta character was introduced in the kitchen of Artie Bucco’s restaurant, shaping fresh mozzarella into a braid. The character was played by actor Federico Castelluccio, but for the cheese-braiding scene, the hands of Mr. Amato’s son, John Jr., actually shaped the mutz.
In a 2021 cooking segment on Sesame Street, the Cookie Monster and Gonger paid a visit to Fiore’s, where they learned how fresh mozzarella was made. (PBS no longer links to the video, but it lives on the deli’s Instagram feed.)
Two months before he died, Mr. Amato was honored by the Hoboken historical museum for his contributions to the culinary heritage of that Mile Square city.
I shared the news with my brothers, who felt as sad as I did. Our hearts go out to the family and to Hoboken. And if I’m honest, the news also made us hungry. As all three of us no longer live in New Jersey, we have to content ourselves with our memories.
If you want to learn more about those, you can check out my previous nonfiction articles:
Hoboken and its food scene figure prominently in at least two of my short stories:
Photos: Hoboken night scene by me; sandwich by Jack Silbert.
“Back to the Boke” (sold as an ebook single, and in the Daggyland #1 collection)
“Last Dance in Hoboken” (collected in the Daggyland #2 collection.)