Article Contributed on: 2/17/2009 2:13:07 PM
Outside, it looks like any other small Italian delicatessen. It's inviting, cheerful and as soon as you open the door, you instantly know what all the locals are raving about.
Like a warm summer breeze envelopes you with all the sweet scents of the season, Enrico's Italian Market, 8020 Chase Drive, tempts your nose right down to your stomach.
Even the most finicky of eater couldn't deny the warm scents of garlic, oregano and freshly spiced meats.
While a sign hanging in the store alludes that "some just come for the smell of it," former Enrico's owner and current employee,
Dee Ciufi, said that is not all what patrons come for.
"I'd say our most popular items are our sausage, meatballs and canolis," she said. "The meatballs, for example, are already cooked and baked, so you can just come pick up a dozen, heat them up at home and you've got dinner."
Everything at Enrico's is homemade.
"When you come in, you can smell that it is," Ciufi said. "All of our cookies and we even make the traditional sausage pies with sausage, eggs and ricotta cheese -- people say it smells like grandma's kitchen."
While the Enrico's Italian Market has been at its Arvada location for about 30 years, Ciufi and her family, which included her husband and three daughters, took over the market 25 years ago from another Italian family. Now, Ciufi has passed the restaurant on to her daughter,
Debbi Slocum.
"I am from Chicago and my husband is from Pennsylvania, and we are both Italian, we both liked to cook and we both enjoyed people," Ciufi said. "And I just learned and picked it up by starting my own recipes and using a lot from my mother, however the sausage recipe was the original owners' recipe and when we bought the store, they sold it to us also."
While Enrico's Italian Market primarily serves for takeout meals, Italian ingredients and goods, as well as a catering service for weddings and parties, it did comprise of a small sit-down restaurant a few years back.
"We tried to do a restaurant, but it just wasn't paying for itself with the sandwiches people were buying," Ciufi said. "So, the market returned to its original take-out format."
And since Enrico's doesn't advertise, they rely heavily on word of mouth both from the catering side of their business and from their long-time patrons.
"Even in this economy, through all the good and bad times, we manage to hang on," Ciufi said. "One day we'll have a bunch of customers and the next, they'll just trickle in."
"For a little business like us, how we continue to hang on with the bigger chains, is because our customers know what they are getting. People don't always have time to make good food themselves, but they appreciate it when it is homemade."