Powered By Perfection: Ioannoni's Specialty Sandwiches
After fifteen years in New Castle, Mike Ioannoni is just getting started.
This isn’t ballet - this is ants marching to the beat of nonstop sandwich building. There aren’t chef coats or garnishing tweezers or bins of little greens and herbs. There are t-shirts and battered spatulas and spilled pork juice. Bottles of vegetable oil and Thousand Island dressing compete for space next to the sub station, right in line with the sweet peppers, the fried long hots, and the onions. This is lunchtime at Ioannoni’s Specialty Sandwiches in New Castle, a place with a soul and a culture all its own.
Founder Mike Ioannoni has been building kick-ass sandwiches here for the better part of fifteen years. Dropping in for a sandwich is unlike most other dining experiences. There is a banter that reaches over the little glass backsplash bordering the kitchen. There is a warm familiarity with the customers stopping in for their fill and a distinct din of a big family yakking about sports, orders being taken, next steps to get Dave’s cheesesteak wrapped, “To go! Dave’s ‘steak is to go!”
There are so many conversations happening interwoven with the constant thumping of knives dropping onto the wooden cutting board. The phone is ringing, the door opens and closes and opens and closes. “Order for Tim! Order for Tim!” The slicer is running, shaving impossibly thin layers on layers on layers of roast beef. “Stella! Stella! Your order is ready!” “Thank you, dear!” The metal-on- metal drumming on the griddle is unrelenting. The printer spews out orders for the crew of five behind the counter.
“There are sixteen of us working here. We are so customer friendly that we know everybody,” declares Mike Ioannoni, the founder of the New Castle landmark. That warmth with guests is second only to the shared knowledge of how to make wondrous sandwiches.
It’s a family thing
Drippy porkette, slooooow roasted beef, and crispy-crusted chicken cutlets sauced with tomato get the frank approach to sandwich craftsmanship. Mike rattles off techniques to constructing the food as if he wrote the blueprint for each sandwich. Because he did. “The grill is packed at lunchtime. We cut our steaks fresh. We get the big slabs of rib-eye and we cut them. The roast beef is cooked daily. Turkeys go for the long, slow roast overnight. For our broccoli rabe, we pick and slice our garlic,” he says, dancing over the industry-accepted practice of buying already peeled garlic. But why?
“When we first got in, I thought we had something good. I was absolutely obsessed; I wanted to perfect what we had.” Without any formal culinary background, Mike notes “we grew up on it! [These] are all of our family’s recipes. That means so much.” It’s a family thing. “For the holidays, my grandmother would cook and whatever was leftover went on a sandwich. When I got older, I figured - we can sell this!”
After some wins for ‘Best Sandwich in the State’ from Purewow and a ‘Best 33 in America’ ranking from online food powerhouse, Thrillist, and some media coverage, the lid came off. On a typical weekday, the crew is crafting 600 to 900 sandwiches. It isn’t unheard of to run out of bread and get a “Sorry, we are out of bread” greeting when you call to place an order.
With a family history of over 50 years in the area, these roots run deep. Ioannoni’s second cousin had a shop in the Shawtown section of the city for decades. When Mike was ready to build his own place, he shook the family tree and did his own thing to get it all just right. “I had mom come in with recipes, and she helped out a bit. She still comes in one day a week,” he notes, to keep everybody behaving.
Many of the crew have been part of the cooking family since day one; that says a lot about the closeness of the crew and the staying power of the restaurant. Like Norma, Mike says, “she’s the backbone. She trained here about fourteen years ago.” It says a lot about what this cooking family means.
Obsession with the details
With a fifteen-year run, and plenty of competition, something must be getting done right. How does a six-table location carve out a spot that matters? Ioannoni pauses and just plainly offers, “I wanted to be different. How can I stand out? I wanted to make a mark,”
Simply put, the pork is tender, the tomato sauce is cooked to an oily rich burgundy, and the steaks are expert. The menu is refreshingly tight; beef, pork and chicken sandwiches, along with a handful of cold subs to appease. “We have a smaller menu but whatever you get is going to be good,” says Mike. “You can’t have a ton of things and have everything fresh.”
Sticking true to his DNA, Mike insists on making everything. “We really are a restaurant: we make the breadcrumbs, we cut the chicken, we bread it ourselves. It’s a lot of work,” he explains. “And that’s the way our grandparents did it.”
Admittedly, “obsessed” goes back to the founding of the shop. There were days when he and his wife, Lisa, rolled in and around Philadelphia peering into windows on espionage missions to glean techniques. “We shred our sharp provolone - the gravy rolls off when it’s sliced. There had to be a better way, so we shred it. That way the gravy soaks in.” That care in the details of building the best sandwiches has made the difference and equates to staying power.
“I wanted to make good food. When I have an obsession with something, there is no balance with me. I’m all in.” Take the chicken cutlet. This isn’t fried chicken; this isn’t grilled chicken. It’s, well, chicken cutlet. A generous crust of very seasoned crumbs laced with plenty of garlic makes up the crux of the cutlet. At a food show, Mike saw the unique “oversized George Foreman grill” that became the cooking element in the alchemy equation for the signature chicken cutlets.
The menu holds steady in these parts. You won’t find an abundance of salads or a bunch of gluten-free dishes, for example. There is no avocado anything, nor is there hummus, za’atar or Sriracha. No offense, mind you, but it just isn’t their thing. What you will find is mouth-watering versions of comfortable classics, like the roast beef soaked in warm jus. The roast pork is a regional mainstay and only gets gussied up with broccoli rabe - that bitter green steeped in garlicky oil - and the shredded super-pungent provolone. The eggplant sandwiches are done up with the classic treatments, as well, and the cheesesteaks drive nighttime sales. These sandwiches aren’t about easy: real rib-eye keeps pace with the quality of the other menu items.
Managing for growth
What’s the next frontier for the sandwich makers? According to Mike, thinking about growing the family. “We want to stay in the area - we like Hockessin and Newark. We also like Silverside [North Wilmington]. We have had people offer to franchise, but I have never been comfortable with that. I would never expand, unless I know I have a solid core of people.”
In managing for growth, Ioannoni has brought on Cindy Capriotti. From her namesake local iconic sandwich group, Capriotti hints that “merging two of the most reputable area [sandwich] names together” might be a next logical step. Onboard since April 2019, Capriotti knows the sandwich business; her family hatched 51 locations over the years and only recently made a split from the new corporate ownership structure.
What else is shaking with the business? “Food-driven everything! What used to be traveling is now travel and food,” notes Ioannoni. Travel is certainly impacting his little-but-mighty sandwich shop. The shop sees an uptick in the summer when other northern Delaware spots often wind down as the beach traffic swells. “We become a destination in the summer. People traveling through stop here on their way.” Some folks, Mike laughs, make the stop only once or twice a year on their way to Rehoboth and other points south. He talks of walking through the parking lot in the summer and not seeing any license plates from Delaware. Rather, beach-goers from elsewhere are popping off of the interstate to make a sandwich detour.
There’s even a nod to the veg-forward demand, without going overboard. “The ‘vegetarian turkey’ brings people in. We have a veggie burger coming soon, too,” he adds. Keeping current without getting fad-silly is part of the shop’s success. They keep each move deliberate.
“If you’re doing your job, it will go right,” says Mike. And by all measures, things at Ioannoni’s are going very right.
Ioannoni’s Specialty Sandwiches
624 E. Basin Road, New Castle, DE
(302) 322-5000; Facebook
