Table & Travel

More and more lately, Cal foot­ball games seem to be start­ing at 4 p.m. Food wise, it’s an awk­ward time, far from lunch and too early for din­ner. What we’ve been doing is pick­ing up a sand­wich at Gen­ova Del­i­catessen on Tele­graph Avenue then eat­ing it when we get to Memo­r­ial Sta­dium an hour or so before the game starts.

Gen­ova is an Oak­land insti­tu­tion. It was opened at 50th and Tele­graph by Ital­ian immi­grants Lorenzo Balbi and Peter Tira in 1926. Orig­i­nally, it was a gro­cery store and ravi­oli fac­tory, which catered to this pre­dom­i­nantly Ital­ian area called Oakland’s Temescal dis­trict. In 1951 Dominic De Vicenzi came to work there and mar­ried the owner’s daugh­ter. In the mid-1960s a sec­ond store was opened in Wal­nut Creek, which is now run by De Vicenzi’s nephew. Due to “ fam­ily dif­fer­ences,” the two busi­nesses are sep­a­rate enti­ties with Dominic own­ing the Oak­land deli and another in Napa. In 1995, the deli moved from its orig­i­nal loca­tion to Vern’s Shop­ping Cen­ter, a strip mall on Tele­graph near 51st Street. It’s across the street from Piz­zaiolo, which cooks fab­u­lous pizza from local ingre­di­ents in their wood-fired oven.

Along with fan­tas­tic sand­wiches, the deli also sells imported Ital­ian foods, pasta, and wine. In the back is a bak­ery and salad/antipasti bar. The sig­na­ture sand­wich is the Ital­ian Combo—a freshly baked roll filled with mor­tadella, galentina, cotto salami, dry salami and pro­volone cheese and cov­ered with fresh veg­eta­bles. Molto bene!