Hi SGLands,
today I want to tell you a little story about my family.
When I was a little child my dad and my uncle had a grocery store in center town and it was really a wonderful place. Every sundays or festivities were always full of people and it was really an important shop for the city, it was like a mini market with high quality products.
My dad was the seller, very talkative and friendly, and my uncle was the cook, he's more shy and close; together were a great combo really!
Everyday they wake up really early at the mornin' to open the store at 7/7.30 a.m., I remember the breakfasts I had with my dad before going to school.
So the day started and first things to do was to set up shop windows with products like pasta, ravioli, cakes, appetizers, sandwiches, grilled chicken, cheeses and different hams and salami. When you entered the shop you immediately saw on the right a big and long cabinet full of wines and on the left a series of big jars with fruit mustard, many shelves with biscuits, snacks, bread and dried mushrooms that continued to the front where there was a lot of cheeses, jams, different kind of sauces, cured meat and products in olive oil in jars.
It was a really decorative shop, because my uncle every years went to Thailand and there he bought so many things for the shop, like dried flowers, sea shells, fake forms of grana cheese and other things like this. (I remember a fake pheasant put as decoration for grilled chicken)
But I have to say that my uncle also love to make decorative things, in fact sometimes he created butter rose compositions to put in the middle of shop windows. But every seasons the style of the shop changes with different decorations, different meals and different things; for this they won an award as the best shop window in the city!!!
About my dad as I said was the talkative person who thought about selling products and doing the accounts in the evening when the shop was closed. He was the one who put his face on it every days, but with a lot of pleasure, he was really a sunny person always with a big smile on his face!
Unfortunately it no longer exists, it has been open for 35 years and in 2009 it closed forever...
Despite everything, people here remember that place and those two brothers who were there to kindly serve every person who walked into their shop.
I'm happy to know that and I miss all this so much.
