Piccolo Pete, a remnant of Candlestick heydays.
A sign outside Piccolo Pete, a 30-year-old deli and liquor store at the junction of Bayshore Boulevard and Tunnel Avenue, boasts it produces more than 200,000 sandwiches per year — which comes out to nearly 550 a day.
In the era when Joe Montana or Will Clark could be found within the nearby Candlestick Park, this was hardly a fanciful claim. Game-day lines would stretch out the door; more than 100 premade sandwiches would be stacked in piles and ready to go. A goodly portion of the papers swirling around the windswept stadium and the bottles littering its aisles surely emanated from this place, as did the liquid courage that induced a litany of insults (or worse) for visiting Dodgers or Rams fans.
The Giants left in 1999. The 49ers decamped in 2013. San Franciscans were denied the catharsis of pushing a button and reducing Candlestick Park to dust, but the aging, misbegotten stadium was razed by 2015.
Piccolo Pete, however, is still here. The sign boasting 200,000 sandwiches remains, but it’s now a cracked and chipping anachronism.
An aging note posted amid reams of sports paraphernalia within reads: “49ERS GAME DAY: PEOPLE WILL BE ASKED TO WORK! PAY WILL BE TIME AND A HALF.” All 16 employees could be impressed into showing up for these events, and still the crush was relentless.
“I was 11. I was told to wash dishes because I didn’t know how to make a sandwich yet,” says third-generation Piccolo Pete owner Bessy Merino, now 31. “I grew up in there.”
Sometimes the juvenile Merino would work one of the three registers, often alongside her grandmother, Joanne Siri, who dutifully dressed in the home uniform of whatever San Francisco team was playing that day.
On a recent Monday morning, Merino’s aunt, Maribel Chavarri, worked the sole remaining register. She’s been here nearly 20 years and is now one of the last four employees.
Piccolo Pete was a place built to accommodate the Sunday crush, and not unlike the 49ers’ mausoleum-like stadium in Santa Clara, it looks painfully empty even when a decent number of customers show up.
Sartorial stylings for patrons here have shifted from black and orange in the summer and red and gold in the fall to luminescent vests and paint-splattered boots year-round; the majority of those dropping by for football-size sandwiches are Recology employees and construction workers.
The mothballing of Candlestick Park hit Piccolo Pete hard — and John Siri harder. Merino’s father largely replaced the walls of liquor once profitably hawked to customers with his Bay Area sports memorabilia. Signed pictures of Jim Ray Hart or the 1957 49ers team photo (sponsor: Falstaff Beer) are a joyous experience for anyone who walks in here. But, unlike liquor, they haven’t made this a profit center.
City documents show liens were placed on this building. “My dad was struggling so much at one point, he did consider selling the business,” says Merino. “But his heart was glued to it.”
John Siri was here in the building when his heart gave way last year. The paramedics did everything they could to revive him, but he was gone, a week shy of his 59th birthday. Reviving Piccolo Pete would fall upon Merino and the rest of the family.
This was a rough time for Merino, who had to put her career as a medical assistant and translator at UCSF on hold while putting an apron back on to work behind the counter, all while grieving for her father. She and her mother, Maria Quijano, and younger brother, David, also flirted with cutting their losses. But the customers recalling decades-old memories of Piccolo Pete, and bringing in their children — as they were themselves brought in as children — tugged at her heartstrings.
She decided she’d give it a year.
It has been a year, and the good news for Merino is that Piccolo Pete’s fare is still very good and very filling. The sandwiches aren’t premade for efficiency as they were in the Bill Walsh/George Seifert era, but you can still get the “famous combo” for $8.75 (three slices of roast beef, turkey, ham, cotto and “any” cheese) and “The Godfather” for $10.75 (three portions of Italian salami, two helpings of mortadella, two helpings of prosciutto, two more of coppa and, of course,
The mothballing of Candlestick Park hit Piccolo Pete hard — and John Siri harder.
cheese). There’s even a secluded patio for those who dine in.
The bad news is that an alarming portion of the nostalgic visitors haven’t been here since their childhoods and assumed Piccolo Pete went the way of the Candlestick Park $4.75 bleacher ticket. New manager Michael Chavarri — Merino’s uncle and Maribel’s husband — says the key is to begin marketing to offices and businesses in a 3- to 5-mile radius. To get on social media. To get on UbertEats. To branch out on the menu — panini, anyone? — without neglecting the oversize sandwiches that made this place. And, of course, to revamp the store’s interior.
Piccolo Pete’s large size, surplus shelving and aging decor give it something of a Soviet department-store feel. Chavarri says the renovations will be done as the money becomes available — but there is hope. The deli’s adjoining coffee shop has been modernized; but for the view out onto Bayshore, it has all the furnishings and gizmos you’d expect of a SoMa cafe. (Merino says the cafe is doing “pretty well,” and the coffee is good.)
Along with millions of sandwiches, Piccolo Pete served a distinct flavor of the American Dream. The papers announcing John William Siri had been honorably discharged from the Navy in 1946 as a Ship’s Cook, First Class, hang on the wall, as does the elder Siri’s self-designed Piccolo Pete jacket and mesh Giants cap. The younger John Siri gazes down from the wall as well, while the Salvadoran family he married into fights to keep alive his Italian American family’s legacy.
“My grandfather used to refer to Piccolo Pete as ‘my baby,’ ” Merino says. “He drew that picture on the jacket. That’s him.” It’s a picture that remains fitting today: a man staring, defiantly, at whatever it is he’s facing.
He is armed only with a sandwich.
Piccolo Pete: 2155 Bayshore Blvd., San Francisco. (415) 4686601. 7 a.m.-5 p.m. MondayFriday; closed Saturday-Sunday.
Joe Eskenazi was born in San Francisco and has covered it journalistically since circa 2000. Twitter: @EskSF Email: food@sfchronicle.com