Carlino brothers have recipe for success
When the Carlino brothers opened a produce stand on Monterey Highway in 1938, there’s no way they could have imagined their family would still be feeding the South Bay 80 years later.
“Not too many families are still left in San Jose carrying on their family’s heritage from the past,” said Sam Carlino Jr., whose dad was one of six brothers who founded the Garden Spot, which served up orange juice and fruit to weary drivers traveling from L.A. to San Francisco.
The family business continues with Carlino, who opened Sam’s Bar-B-Que on Bascom Avenue with his father in 1992, as well as Entrees Unlimited, a corporate catering service in San Jose run by his cousin, Peter Carlino. In between, various members of the family owned Time Market in San Jose, the Round House Liquor and Deli in Campbell, food delivery service Silicon Valley Delites, Felton Deli, and S&S Sausages and Pietro’s Fisherman’s Wharf, which were both at the San Jose Flea Market.
And for more than a decade, South Bay foodies could watch the two cousins — Sam and Peter — along with other local chefs on “Who’s Cookin’,” a community television show that ran on Comcast until 2011.
The Carlinos even had a hand in shaping another local institution in 1971, when a college student named Mike Cobler approached Pete Carlino Sr. at the Round House. He had just bought a small sandwich shop near San Jose State called Togo’s and thought the sandwiches could be improved.
Carlino put Cobler to work for a few days behind the counter, teaching him about weighing portions so a consistent amount of meat was getting onto each sandwich and recommending Speciality Baking for Togo’s bread. The rest is history.
But it all started with those six brothers — Vic, Joe, Chuck, Steve, Sam and Pete — who grew up in San Jose’s Italiandominated Goosetown neighborhood. The family was originally from Colorado, where the brothers’ father and uncle were Prohibition-era bootleggers. Sam Carlino Jr. says he was led to believe his grandfather died of pneumonia until a customer at S&S Sausage, who knew the family from way back, told him that he’d been gunned down in
1931. “Pneumonia? Nah, he died of lead poisoning,” Carlino remembers being told.
With Monterey Highway as the main route between Los Angeles and the Bay Area in those days, the Carlino brothers did well with their produce stand. “These guys had fresh juices and fruits and slices of watermelon, so it was like an oasis,” Sam Carlino Jr. said.
The onset of World War II scattered them for a while — and Steve was killed at Pearl Harbor in 1941 — but the brothers got back together in 1950 to open Time Market on Bascom Avenue. It was already an institution before they turned it into Time Deli in 1977 and finally sold it in 1987. “I spent a lot of my formative years between second grade and fifth grade sleeping on sacks of potatoes and working in the deli,” Peter Carlino Jr., 66, says with a laugh. Time Deli was still around until last year, when an ADA lawsuit forced its owner to close.
It was the family atmosphere — the brothers’ wives were an integral part of making the operation work — that the Carlinos continued into their later ventures. Peter Sr. started Entrees Unlimited in 1982 with his sons, Peter and Patrick, serving Italian food to South Bay companies. “We had a one-page menu and delivered food in a Honda Civic,” Peter Carlino said. “Our first corporate customer was Sony Corporation, but I don’t think the term ‘corporate catering’ was even invented yet.”
Meanwhile, Sam Carlino Jr. was cutting his teeth — and a lot of meat — as a 24-year-old butcher for Zanotto’s when his dad proposed they open barbecue restaurant together. It was no easy task to transform an office building into a restaurant, but Carlino says it had immeasurable benefits. “I really didn’t see my dad until I was 12 years old because he was working all the time, but the last 10 years of his life I got to work with him,” said Carlino, 51. “I got to be with him on a daily basis, and I really understood that old-school work ethic.”
All six of the original brothers have died, with Sam Carlino the last to go in 2002. And not everything has stayed old-school for the current Carlino generation. Peter Carlino Jr.’s corporate catering business has kept up with Silicon Valley’s growing diversity, offering customers a lot more than a one-page Italian menu. “About 20 percent of our orders are vegetarian now, and 20 years ago, I don’t think we did any,” he said.
Among the baby-back ribs, steaks and sausages at Sam’s — still homemade using the old Time Market recipe — Sam Carlino Jr. has added to his menu the Impossible Burger, a plantbased burger that looks and feels like meat, as well as $80 bottles of Caymus wine.
But the Carlinos say loyalty remains one of their most important ingredients. Both companies can boast of having employees who have been around for decades. Some of their customers — many they consider friends — go back that far, too.
It’s one of the lessons they learned from their dads and uncles, whose Time Market outlasted two nearby competitors.
“They were not the cheapest market, but they had the highest quality and the best service,” Sam Carlino Jr. said. “I think there’ll always be a market for service and quality.”