Sometimes you have to walk away from something to understand just how much it means to you.

For Giacomo Santomauro, food was never simply a business. It was family. The son of Italian immigrants from Naples and Sicily, Giacomo grew up in Huntington, Long Island, surrounded by the sights, smells and rhythms of an Italian American food family. His father and family had three restaurants and a butcher shop.

For young Giacomo, that meant afternoons, weekends and holidays spent working. Add his time as a volunteer firefighter in New York, and by adulthood he was ready for something different.

So he walked away from the food business. At 29, Giacomo applied to fire departments up and down the East Coast. High Point, North Carolina, gave him his opportunity. He was hired just one week before marrying his wife, Laura. The newlyweds went on their honeymoon, returned home, packed a U-Haul and headed south to begin a completely new life.

But as Giacomo discovered, sometimes the grass isn't greener—it’s just different.

With their first baby on the way, he began moonlighting as a waiter while working as a firefighter. And from the other side of the restaurant business, something changed. The deli world he had once been so eager to escape began to look different.

He appreciated it. More importantly, he missed it.

Opening Giacomo’s

In 1998, Giacomo and Laura took a chance and opened the original Giacomo’s on High Point Road in Greensboro.

The rest, as they say, is history. Over the years, Giacomo’s has become much more than an Italian market. It is one of those special neighborhood places that people tell their friends about, and then keep returning to themselves.

The shop is known for its house-made sausages and deli meats, meatballs, sauces, salads and prepared foods, along with Italian cheeses, marinated vegetables, antipasti, breads and hard-to-find imported Italian specialties. Their made-to-order Italian sandwiches have developed a devoted following of their own.

But perhaps the best way to understand Giacomo’s is to look at what happens behind the counter.

Fresh mozzarella is made daily, served warm and delicious. Imported specialties such as mortadella and Prosciutto di Parma share space with Italian pantry staples including pasta, flour and canned tomatoes. Yet Giacomo also looks close to home whenever possible. One of my favorite examples has nothing to do with a fancy supplier. Giacomo buys tomatoes from a local mechanic. Those locally grown tomatoes now find their way into Giacomo’s deli. That says a lot about the man and the business: Italian tradition, Carolina community and good ingredients matter more than fancy labels.

Love discovering Italy one bite at a time? Subscribe to the free Appetito newsletter for the latest restaurant openings and Italian travel news.

San Giuseppe Salami Co.

By the early 2000s, Giacomo recognized something else. When he first moved south from New York, the authentic Italian flavors he grew up with weren't always easy to find in the Carolinas.

So he began making them himself. Cured meats and homemade deli specialties were produced in the back of the store, using the traditions and flavors Giacomo knew from his Italian American upbringing. Customers responded and demand grew. In 2007, San Giuseppe Salami Co. was born, and a processing location was built in Elon, North Carolina.   Today, San Giuseppe produces more than 20 specialties, from cured meats to deli favorites, with distribution throughout the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia. Packaged salami chubs can also be found at select Harris Teeter locations. But growth hasn't meant abandoning the methods that made the products special in the first place.

San Giuseppe's philosophy can be summed up in three words: handcrafted with purpose.

The company uses locally sourced farm-raised meats, fresh herbs and proprietary spice blends, drawing on time-honored Italian recipes passed through generations of the family. Products are made without MSG, BHA or BHT, allowing traditional preparation, carefully chosen ingredients and the natural flavors of the meats to take center stage. And rather than approaching production like a large industrial operation, San Giuseppe continues to work in intentionally small batches. That hands-on process allows the team to watch quality closely, make adjustments along the way and pay attention to the flavor and texture of every batch.

The inspiration comes unmistakably from Italian and Italian American traditions, but the story behind it is now firmly rooted in the American South.

Food and family

After decades in business, you might expect Giacomo to be a man who is constantly chasing the next big thing.

He isn't. He describes himself as easygoing but someone who pays attention to small details.  And like so many Italians, given the choice, he would rather be home cooking and sitting around the table with his family than almost anywhere else.

There is, however, one exception to that easygoing philosophy. Tell Giacomo you don't like his meatballs, and apparently all bets are off. He jokes that it would devastate him.

And maybe that tells us everything we need to know. Because beneath the successful market, the growing salami company and more than two decades of serving the Piedmont, Giacomo Santomauro is still the son of Italian immigrants who learned that food means something. It is pride. It is family. It is memory. It is the recipes and traditions we carry from one generation to the next, and sometimes from Long Island all the way to Greensboro, North Carolina.

Giacomo may have left the family food business once. But in the end, he didn't just come back to it. He made it his own.