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As a lifelong New Yorker and half Italian, I thought I knew all the Italian parm hero sandwiches within the five boroughs. There were pillars holding up parm culture— chicken, eggplant, veal, meatball, topped with sauce and cheese and stuffed on hero bread that was both crusty and soft. I’d eaten them as treats at my local pizza place for good report cards, and ordered platters of these delights at restaurants named for them. When it came to parms, I thought I knew it all and saw it all.
Then one day last spring I stepped inside a Brooklyn deli I’d never been to before. And there, listed between a pastrami and an eggplant parmigiana, I saw a sandwich I’d never heard of: an artichoke parmigiana.
The sandwich in question was at Mama Louisa’s Hero Shoppe in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn. With a handwritten menu and a sign with a drawing of a chef, it felt familiar, though it was my first time there. There was one other customer inside with me that Saturday, and I spun toward him. “Artichoke parm!” I said. “I’ve never seen that before! Have you?” He smiled, and assured me it was good. It was only $9 for a large hero, and I had to order it. Along with a more traditional Italian cold cut hero with prosciutto and capicola, the artichoke parm rode delicately in the passenger seat during my drive home to Queens.
At home, I immediately opened the hero on my kitchen counter, taking it in. It had a weight to it. When I pulled both halves of the sandwich apart, I saw the hero bread perfectly enveloped the artichoke mixture inside, which I would later learn had bits of scrambled egg mixed in with artichoke hearts and mozzarella cheese. The smell coming out from the warm halves was herby and tart.
I took one bite and then stepped away. The sandwich was unlike anything I’d ever tasted. It was creamy from melty mozz and a little tangy from jarred artichoke hearts and marinara sauce, hefty without spilling out of the sides. The bread was strong on the outside yet pillowy inside.
On my second bite, I tried to figure out exactly what else was in there with the trinity of artichoke hearts and sauce and cheese, how they managed to prepare it so the artichoke taste was present but not overpowering. I rapidly compared it to my decades of the other parms I’d eaten, stored in my memories. Sometimes a chicken parm is too chewy, an eggplant parm too oily, a meatball parm too big. But this parm was perfect—substantial and flavorful, and comforting while still offering something fresh. By my third bite, I had become obsessed.
I texted a friend who lived near the shop: “get an artichoke parm asap.” I saved the other half of the impressively large hero to bring to another friend later, forcing her to try it. I posted a video on my Instagram praising this new-to-me sandwich, setting off a rush of friends and followers asking me about it. Other lifelong New Yorkers had questions about this sandwich, agreeing that they’d hadn’t seen it before. Was it battered and fried? (No.) Was it the artichoke leaves? (No.)
I work at a nonprofit news site covering New York City government and politics, and for months, I asked nearly everyone I saw—other reporters, elected officials, the guy behind the counter at every pizzeria I stepped inside—if they’d ever heard of an artichoke parm hero. Nobody had, but many were curious as soon as I mentioned it.
I needed more people to experience this with me. It became known among my friends and colleagues as “The Sandwich.”
I asked Ben Gollan, the man behind a sandwich Instagram account, if he’d ever heard of or seen the artichoke parm around the city.
“You threw me for a little bit of a loop when you asked me about the artichoke parm sandwich because I’ve never seen it on my travels,” said Gollan, who has taken thousands of people on his sandwich tours across New York City since launching in 2016. His friends within the sandwich community hadn’t heard of it, either. Roman Grandinetti, the Brooklyn-raised owner of the Italian specialty shop and deli Regina’s Grocery, named for his mom, told me they would sometimes make an artichoke parmesan for a vegetarian employee, but it wasn’t on the menu, and they fried the artichokes. It’s a “fun flip” on the vegetarian options, he said—but it’s rare, “more of a ‘get lucky’ special.” And it’s not anything like the Mama Louisa’s version.
The Sandwich consumed me. I kept returning to Mama Louisa’s—about a 25 minute drive from my apartment—to pick it up to bring to my family and friends. I was an evangelist hoping to convert new believers. How had I lived my whole life in New York City without ever knowing of The Sandwich? Who came up with this combination, and why wasn't it a mainstay on sandwich menus across the city? I spent hours reading through the menus of every Italian deli I could find in New York City to see if anyone else was selling this sandwich.
But the only one I ever saw was at Mama Louisa’s, cooked in the back kitchen of the corner deli with a rich history I would soon learn all about.
The history of parmigiana—also colloquially called parmesan or parm—platters and heroes across the United States dates back to the Italian diaspora around the turn of the 20th century, centered in the Northeast, according to scholars and historians.
It doesn’t have anything to do with the cheese it shares a name with, which originates in the Parma region of Italy. And like a lot of food dishes, its true origin has been debated.
La Cucina Italiana found the first historical mention of a parmigiana dish in a cookbook from the 1700s—it used zucchini, though these days eggplant is far more popular. Some trace the eggplant parmigiana to Sicily, ascribing its name to various forms of other Sicilian words, like “parmiciana,” a word for wooden shutters or roof slats. Another food historian said it’s a version of the word “damigiana,” the wicker sleeve used to shield a bottle of wine or a dish of cooked eggplant and cheese.
The dish made its way to the United States and was eventually put between bread to make a sandwich. Its popularity has expanded to a wide audience, and the people who make the parm are not just Italian American. That was the case with the artichoke parm of today, as I found when I started my journey to hunt down the origin of The Sandwich. Mama Louisa’s current owner, Edgar Lunavictoria, moved to New York from Ecuador when he was 18 years old. A friend helped him get his first job at Fortunato Brothers, a well-known Italian bakery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It was there he learned about Italian pastries and other desserts, such as cannolis and tiramisu, from the bakery’s family recipes.
Years later, Lunavictoria, 45, opened his own restaurants—Las Lunitas and El Mio Cid, both in Brooklyn—which served a mix of Spanish, Italian, and American food. Two of his regular customers were Franco and Louisa Conigliaro, who owned Mama Louisa’s at the time, and they became friends through frequent visits. By 2014, the Conigliaros were looking to sell—and they asked Lunavictoria if he was interested. “They gave it to me,” he said, with one piece of advice: “Keep it all the same. It works.”
So he didn’t change the deli’s name, the menu, or even most of the kitchen staff, with one chef working for 40 years and another there for 20. The usual customers—a mix of neighbors, employees of the nearby Kings County Hospital Center, and sanitation workers—also wouldn’t let him change much.
Earlier this year, he opened a coffee shop on the side of the deli, and he runs both with his family. He said the artichoke parmesan is still made the same way as the previous owners, with artichoke hearts, eggs, and cheese. “That’s how the customers want it,” he said.
Lunavictoria didn’t invent the parm and was a bit protective of its recipe, which, along with others, were part of his sale. So I hunted down his old friends, Franco and Louisa Conigliaro, working my way back to The Sandwich’s roots.
In the early 1980s, the couple was living in Ridgewood, Queens, and Franco ran a pizzeria on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn that bore his name, Franco’s. Around 1984, a friend told them that the owners of a sandwich shop a few avenues over called Punzone’s were looking to sell, and the Conigliaros thought it could be a good investment.
The Punzones let them keep everything in the sale except the family name. So the Conigliaros renamed the store Mama Louisa’s, and for a few years, the couple ran both shops. (For the New York City historians, the Conigliaro’s referred to the location of the deli as Crown Heights at the time; now it is known as Prospect Lefferts Gardens.) Louisa grew to consider the regular customers as a second family, and they were cautious about making any drastic adjustments. “The only thing that changed was who was behind the cash register,” she said.
A notable part stayed the same: the recipes, including the artichoke parm. She learned the recipes from the cooks still working in the kitchen, and found that The Sandwich took a few hours to prepare. The jarred artichoke hearts needed to be squeezed and then baked low and slow to draw out all the liquid. Then they added scrambled egg and cheese before topping it with marinara sauce and more cheese.
The sandwich was a personal favorite of Louisa’s, but it had a niche audience. “You kinda had to push it, because people look at you like you have two heads when you say ‘artichoke parm’,” she said. If someone ordered an eggplant parm sandwich, she sometimes slipped in a piece of the artichoke parm hero for them to try. Still, it was one of the things that made the shop unique. “Anyone can make chicken parm,” said Louisa, but the artichoke parm was special. She still makes it at home for family, who consider it a favorite. “It doesn’t last long,” she said.
After 40 years at the shop, the couple grew tired of their commute to the deli from their home on Staten Island, where they had moved to after Ridgewood. They wanted to spend more time with their grandkids. So they sold to Lunavictoria and opened up another Mama Louisa’s in Parsippany, New Jersey, in 2015, where they sold the artichoke parm for three years before retiring.
So I’d found another person who loved The Sandwich. But the true origin was still ahead.
Thankfully it wasn’t hard for me to find the Punzones. It was so far the simplest part of the journey: I Googled “Punzones” and “Brooklyn” and found Tara Punzone, a plant-based chef who owns three restaurants called Pura Vita in Los Angeles.
I went through articles about chef Tara Punzone’s restaurant openings, and in multiple stories, she said she looked up to her grandfather Charlie, who owned a sandwich shop in Brooklyn that was so popular they had to hire security to guard the door. I messaged her on Instagram, desperate to know if this was her family, if she could help me learn more. “I realize it’s maybe bizarre, but I hope you’d understand how obsessive someone could be about a sandwich,” I wrote.
She wrote back quickly. “I’m not sure exactly why or how to explain, but this just made me tear up,” she said. “My grandpa was the coolest and an incredible cook (would never refer to himself as a chef) and he was my idol.” She said Charlie came up with the artichoke parmesan hero one day in their grocery store-turned-deli, and her family would be happy to tell me more.
The story of Punzone’s has been passed down through the generations of the family, with Charlie’s only surviving son Paul, Tara’s dad, as one of the only people still alive to share it. He told me it started with the building, which his maternal grandfather Vincenzo Fiorito built in the early 1920s.
At the time, the neighborhood was still known as Pigtown—named for the pigs that roamed the area as it transitioned from farmland at the edge of the City of Brooklyn into a community by the late 1800s. Fiorito was originally a farmer, and after building the property, he ran a small grocery store for the neighborhood, which was mostly Italian and Irish, Paul told me.
Fiorito eventually became father-in-law to Enrico “Charlie” Punzone. Charlie’s family had moved to Brooklyn from Gragnano, Italy, off the Amalfi Coast. He grew up on Myrtle Avenue, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, as the 7th of 16 kids, although five siblings died as babies. His father also died young, and he was forced to take on many of the household responsibilities, including cooking. He later married Frances Fiorito, whose father was Vincenzo Fiorito, and in the 1950s, after Vincenzo retired, Charlie took over the grocery. Frances and Charlie started raising their own family, including Tara’s father Paul and aunt Joan, above the shop.
To Paul and Tara, and other former Pigtown residents, Charlie Punzone was a legend behind his family store’s counter. He was involved in the local parish, St. Blaise, and it made the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper when he and other members from his parish group met then-Mayor Robert Wagner. He was known for taking care of neighbors, Paul said. If kids came to the store for food and didn’t have enough money, he recalls his father letting them take the food anyway, saying he’d write down what they owed, but didn’t ask for the money later. “He would never let anybody go hungry,” Paul told me. “But he wanted to let them think they were going to pay someday.”
Paul and his sister worked at the shop from the time they were little, with Paul pushing a cart to make deliveries all over Pigtown. And he was there in the early 1950s, working the register as an 11 or 12 year old, on the exact day when the store started making sandwiches, he said. Charlie was in the back frying up meatballs for the family’s dinner when a sanitation worker named Gregory from the nearby garage came in. Intoxicated by the smell of onions and garlic in the pan, the man asked him if his dad could make him a meatball sandwich. His dad said yes, and then refused any money for the hero.
“They went back and forth. Gregory insisted he wanted to pay and my dad kept saying no,” Paul remembers it. Gregory went off without paying, but that sandwich set off a new business for the grocery store.
Over the next few days, he came in with at least five other Sanitation workers who wanted hot sandwiches. Word quickly spread to nearby Kings County Hospital and a nearby high school. “Soon all the kids were lining up for sandwiches,” Paul said. It was so chaotic having so many people in the small grocery store that Charlie hired a man they called Big Mike to control the crowds at the front, with the line often wrapping around down Rutland Road—a piece of family lore that lives on today.
Punzone’s became one of the many businesses in New York that first and second-generation Italian Americans would frequent.
“If you talk to people in that neighborhood, they’ll remember Punzone’s,” said Jerome Krase, the former director for the Center for Italian American Studies at Brooklyn College and a sociologist who has focused on Italian American culture and its people. His wife grew up just two blocks from the deli and he told me that these businesses were as important as church to Italian immigrants and their children. “Everything is ritualized,” Krase said. “Even going to Punzone’s for a hero sandwich—it wasn’t merely the eating of the food, but the interaction with the owner and the people that were there and the people that you went to get food for.”
The menu initially had hot and cold sandwiches, like ham and cheese, or a meatball. But it later took some divine intervention to lead to the creation of the artichoke parm.
At the time in their mostly Catholic neighborhood, where everyone was known by which parish they were a part of, most of the deli’s customers observed the religious custom of not eating meat on Friday. And since most of the sandwiches had meat, they had fewer customers that day. “The Jewish guys could do that but the Italian guys had to skip the sandwiches,” Paul said.
So Charlie started selling an eggplant parmesan, chopping it up instead of slicing the eggplant because it fit better on the hero bread. It became an instant favorite, served only on Fridays when most of the customers weren’t eating meat. Still, Charlie wanted to do something else for Fridays, and they already sold artichoke hearts at the shop, Paul said. That’s when Charlie invented The Sandwich.
Just as Louisa Conigliaro said, Charlie took hours to make the artichoke parm due to the slow-cooking process, according to Paul. It’s not known why Charlie chose the other elements of the sandwich, like the scrambled eggs. It may have just been his own creativity, or perhaps a way to stretch out the artichoke. Paul insists nobody could ever make an artichoke parm just like his father did, although Charlie shared the recipe with his two children—and later various versions of it with the different owners of the shops. “There is a written recipe for the eggplant and the artichoke…it’s pages long and try as you may to follow it, the result is never the same,” Paul said.
The popularity of Charlie’s sandwiches are in part what made him a neighborhood legend. On the Pigtown Facebook page, former residents—many of whom have since moved far from the old neighborhood—speak about Punzone’s with nostalgia and reverence. They remember their orders, what everything cost, and who they shared a sandwich with. In their memories, they were the best sandwiches they ever had.
And the neighbors still talk about Paul’s father. “I was ‘Charlie's son,’” Paul said, which is how he’s referred to by many, even now, 40 years after his dad’s death. “I was always ‘Charlie’s son.’”
The family sold the deli in 1984 to Louisa and her family. Paul, who worked as a life insurance executive until retirement, recently moved with his wife to Los Angeles to be near his daughter Tara, who was only six when her grandfather died.
As a kid, she was constantly told stories about her grandfather, the “legend Charlie,” and how he treated his family and his customers. It inspired her to become a chef after a career as a photographer—even though her father warned her of the long hours required to run a successful business. “He dedicated his life to making people happy through food,” she said of her grandfather. “I have completely followed in his footsteps in that sense. Good food, made with love, makes people happy and spreads the love throughout the community.” And the artichoke parm may find a new life on another coast. Tara plans on playing with The Sandwich recipe to make a vegan version at her restaurant.
Today, the original artichoke parm is still a niche sandwich. In a sweep of online reviews of Mama Louisa’s, there are just a few for The Sandwich.
But those who love it are extremely dedicated fans. “It’s bready and greasy, and all of that start just kicks in your wolfing instincts,” said Charles Star, a 52-year-old lawyer and podcaster, who has lived nearby since 2006 and loves the artichoke parm. Like me, he’s become a “proselytizer” for the hero. It’s one of those special sandwiches that gives New York City its charm, he said. “The only thing really wrong with it is, you kind of want to slow down and savor, and it doesn’t really encourage that,” said Star.
Its uniqueness may be why The Sandwich hasn’t spread to other spots across New York City. Maybe, as Louisa suspected, it’s less common and needs someone to passionately advocate for it. Or maybe with its hours-long cooking process, it’s too hard to replicate. Whatever the reason artichokes haven’t gained footing in the parm canon, the neighborhood’s love for The Sandwich has remained so strong that more than 50 years later, a third owner of the deli simply can’t take it off the menu.
My yearlong fixation on The Sandwich helped me better understand my own city—the way it evolves and grows and changes but still carries its history with it, in the people and the food that sticks around. Every time I visit Mama Louisa’s, I’m reminded of the reason Charlie Punzone started selling sandwiches in the first place. I usually see a truck from Brooklyn 9, the sanitation garage nearby, parked outside. Its workers are inside picking up food, like they were 70 years ago.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Edgar Lunavictoria’s name.