SMALL SAUSAGE SPOT DRAWS BIG CROWDS.
The little Santa Cruz County town of Corralitos, a collection of homes and commercial buildings scattered among green hillsides 20 miles east of Santa Cruz, is an unlikely spot for a flash mob.
To get there, you drive on a series of back roads that are innocently pretty — barns! tractors! orchards! — but so circuitous you worry your GPS is going to give up in despair.
And yet, arrive around lunch time and you’ll encounter a massive crowd of contractors, gardeners, realtors, business types in sleek BMWs and Lycra-clad cyclists easing off of road bikes — all packing into a small restaurant at the heart of Corralitos’ tiny downtown called Corralitos Market & Sausage.
“We get people driving here from all over the Bay Area, from Monterey, everywhere in-between,” says Dave Peterson, the sausage maestro who has worked at the market for 43 years, starting when he was a high school sophomore.
The Corralitos Market story goes back more than a century. Founded in the 1890s, the market moved to its present building in the 1920s. But the sausage saga only began in the 1950s, when then-owner Joe Cutler noticed his place had an unused smokehouse and “starting playing around with curing and smoking,” Peterson says. (The Cutler family remains part-owner.)
They don’t play around today. Corralitos has four smokehouses — pitch-black, bank-vault-looking affairs filled with sausages and applewood smoke — and produces 3,000 pounds of sausage a week, which they sell at the market and ship across the country.
Corralitos sells packaged sausages, but most people go for lunch. When you reach the head of the line you are confronted by an array of options gleaming behind glass before you: Polish Kobasica, Wild Boar, Ostrich, Andouille, Ham and
Swiss — nearly 30 varieties. The bevy of choices is a little paralyzing, but here’s reassurance: all are delicious.
Still, if you want to try the market’s signature sausage, go for the Cheesy Bavarian, a mild German number embedded with creamy cheddar. “It’s huge,” says Peterson. “I can’t say enough about it. It’s simple, down-to-earth, but, man, everybody loves it.”
And then, having acquired your sausage sandwich and paused at the condiment table, you can do what a lot of patrons do and take your lunch to the tiny park across the road. Sit at the picnic table beside the flagpole, listen to the flapping flag. Savor each morsel. And marvel at how your GPS brought you here.
“We get people driving here from all over the Bay Area, from Monterey, everywhere in-between.” Dave Peterson, of the Corralitos Market & Sausage Co.