Cheese Biz Pioneer Dies At 87

Pasquale ​“Lino” Liuzzi’s first job upon immigrating to America in 1962 was pouring concrete for sidewalks in the Bronx.

A few weeks after landing that work, he saw an ad in an Italian newspaper: a factory in East Haven was looking for a cheesemaker. He decided to give it a shot.

So he took a train to New Haven station — and took his first steps towards building a Connecticut cheese empire.

Liuzzi, the co-founder of Liuzzi Cheese, died earlier this month at the age of 87.

His culinary legacy lives on in Italian restaurants across New Haven that use his company’s cheeses in their dishes. Those city restaurants include Gioia, Encore by Goodfellas, Portofino’s, Tre Scalini, and Tavern on State, to name a few, according to Liuzzi’s granddaughter, Francesca.

Liuzzi’s best friend, Louis Abate of Abate Pizza, remembered him as a self-made man with a heart of gold. The two first met more than five decades ago when they worked at C&F Cheese in East Haven making mozzarella.

That was in 1970. Liuzzi had come to the United States eight years before, a third generation cheesemaker who grew up in Noci, a village in the region of Puglia in southern Italy. ​“The war took everything,” said his son Domenico Liuzzi, who runs the flagship market in North Haven. ​“There was nothing there.”

Liuzzi landed in New York City with $50 in his pocket, a few scraps of English, and no connections, family or other. ​“He walked up to this man, he could tell he was Italian by his short collar, and they started talking,” Domenico said. That was how he found work pouring concrete for sidewalks in the Bronx. Then the Italian newspaper ad led him to the East Haven cheesemaking job.

“They picked him up at the New Haven train station, brought him in, and he worked there for the next 20 years,” Domenico said. When, eight years into his tenure, Abate joined him, Liuzzi shared his dream of opening his own cheese market.

“He said he knew how to make all these different cheeses that they don’t have here, knew the ingredients, knew the secrets,” Abate said. ​“And I believed he would do it.”

The reason: ​“No one ever worked as hard as Lino did, and I tell you, he outworked me at 19, 20, and he was 34.” That continued during the year or so he was working a second job to get the store off the ground. ​“He would put in eight to ten hours at the cheese factory, go home and lie down for an hour or two, and then go to the Stop & Shop warehouse and work at night loading the docks,” he said.

Already his mozzarella was gaining renown. In the garage of his Quinnipiac Avenue home, Liuzzi’s son Ralph recalled him and his brother Domenico cutting the curd into small pieces, which their father and uncle would then stretch. By then, Liuzzi had met Vincenza DePascale at an English class at the Conte School in Wooster Square. They married in 1967.

“My mother was working as a seamstress in New Haven and she would take orders of mozzarella from the Italian ladies,” said Ralph, who oversees the family’s cheesemaking operation in Hamden. ​“No one was making fresh mozzarella at that time.”

In September 1981, Lino and Nicola opened the market on 322 State St. in North Haven, naming it Caseificio Moderno Liuzzi Cheese to continue the tradition started by their great-grandfather in 1826.

“The intent was to have a storefront for the cheese and then do some retail, but that’s not what it turned into,” Domenico said. ​“And that’s because my father and my uncle, they worked like bulls, especially during the holiday season, they’d start at 2 in the morning and we wouldn’t get home ​’til 11 at night.”

When relatives or friends came from Italy, ​“my father would give them his bed and give them their start,” Domenico said. When his cousin Claudia DePascale-Muro got laid off, he offered her a job. She’s been his bookkeeper and accountant at the market since 1991.

“He did it quietly,” said Abate; Liuzzi helped him buy the building on Wooster Street that housed his legendary pizza restaurant. And he included his family, with his daughter Roseann working in the office starting at age 12 — she’s now CFO — and his grandchildren filling roles in the company from office assistants and stock clerks to marketing manager.

“It was always about family and quality and service,” Ralph said. ​“He taught us that you can make a good product, but without that personal touch, the product doesn’t mean anything, and he taught us that you need your family and good friends around you to be in a business like this.”

It was that combination, it seemed, that had Liuzzi’s expanding operations to Hamden in 2006.

“That was at my father’s insistence,” Ralph said. ​“He wanted us to be able to compete.” By then, the company was becoming a national brand with market shares as far away as Colorado and Texas — Liuzzi Cheese is now in 38 states — and ​“there were certain things you needed to do to sell to certain places and you had to be up to code or you couldn’t do it.”

That expansion has led to a host of awards from the illustrious American Cheese Society, and ever more restaurants with Liuzzi Cheese on their menus.

Liuzzi’s granddaughter Francesca, who is the marketing manager, recounted a rare night out at a restaurant in Middletown when Liuzzi saw the Liuzzi name on the menu. He was so proud that he asked to buy the menu. ​“I don’t think he grasped how iconic his cheese had become,” she said.

“One day he asked me, ​‘why do we do work like this?’” Louis Abate recalled. ​“And then he answered his own question. ​‘I do all this for a dish of pasta and a glass of wine at the end of the day.’”