Our story

The family has been in cheese for about sixty years — the wholesale end, the part nobody photographs: making it, weighing it, loading it, arguing about it with a brother and a sister across a table. A deli is the small end of that trade, and it is the end we wanted: the same cheese, sold to the person who is actually going to eat it.

Durbanville is not short of places to buy a coffee and something wrapped in plastic. It is short of the other thing — a counter where the mortadella is cut fresh rather than pre-packed, and where someone can tell you which mozzarella to take home and why. Not a chain. Not a supermarket counter. Not a bakery that also does coffee. Italian food made the way it is actually made, which mostly means fewer ingredients, better ones, and nothing that has to apologise for itself next to the real version.

There is nowhere to sit, on purpose. The idea came from the delis of southern Italy and the ones that followed the families out: you come in, someone who knows the food hands it to you across the counter, and you take it with you. No table to wait for, no bill to settle. It is a better way to eat on a Tuesday.

Artichokes now. In two months, something else. We buy what is good that week and write it up that morning, which means the board is never the same twice and there is no printed menu to contradict it. It also means we do not build whatever you can think of — we make the short list that was worth making today. If you want to know what is on before you drive over, it is on this website by the time the doors open.