In the early 90s, an unfamiliar breed of customer began filtering into the West Loop’s J.P. Graziano Grocery Company, asking for single boxes of pasta and quarter-pound slices of pecorino Romano. Jim Graziano says his father, James, and great-uncle Paul didn’t know what to make of them. “They’d look at them cross-eyed,” he says. “Like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
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Though he’s only 29, Jim Graziano has worked in the store for 20 years. He started out cleaning bathrooms, sweeping floors, and carrying purchases out to customers’ cars, among other duties: “I’d sit on the desk and watch the front door so that bums wouldn’t take a can of tuna fish as they walked by,” he says. He watched as the children of Italian immigrants who were the store’s regulars were joined by art dealers and condo dwellers. After graduating from DePaul in 2003 and joining the business full-time, he slowly began making changes to adapt to the newcomers.
“He’d go to a fruit stand and grab a couple lemons and throw them in his pocket, go around the corner and sell it,” says Graziano. “Saved enough money and bought a basket. Did what he had to do to make ends meet for himself at the time.” “J.P.” eventually opened a grocery by Grand and Noble, selling imported Italian foods to his fellow immigrants, who continued to call him Signore Vincenzo.
“I would love to know what—not only what my dad, but my grandpa, my great-grandpa, thinks of me selling cheese that’s $29 a pound,” says Graziano. “I could just see the look on their faces.” But it’s the wholesale business that gives him the buying power to sell his retail goods at relatively good prices. Online sources will sell four ounces of bottarga—cured Sardinian mullet roe—for as much as $82; Graziano sells it for an astonishing $35.
901 W. Randolph, 312-666-4587
jpgraziano.com
