Forbes once declared that the best salami in the country can be found right here in St. Louis, at Salume Beddu (7118 Oakland, Richmond Heights). Mark Sanfilippo opened the shop in the mid-2000s with a mission to make the best cured meats. (In fact, the shop’s name translates to “beautiful cured meat” in Sicilian.) The shop’s products are hand-crafted and uncompromising, utilizing only top-tier ingredients and continuing to set the benchmark for salumerias.
How did your love of cured meats evolve? My family cooks a lot, and we’d make sausages at Christmas, so I always liked to cook and eat. I lived in Germany for a year while I was a student at the University of Stuttgart. My dorm had a lot of Italian exchange students. One guy would bring back sausage made with elk that his dad had hunted. It was sort of transformative. Later, in LA, I was working as a cook for Nancy Silverton [at Pizzeria Mozza]. She had a cured-meats program that I was absolutely obsessed with; I started making things at home and brought them in [to the restaurant].
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How did Salume Beddu develop as a business? I started out in 2007 or 2008 at farmers’ markets while working as an instructor at L’Ecole Culinaire. Then, in 2010, we opened the [original] shop [at 3467 Hampton]… In 2012, we got our USDA inspection, so we could sell outside the store. We pretty quickly ran out of room—the cure room was absolutely packed. We found an old egg roll plant in about 2015 that had already been FDA-inspected, and suddenly we had a factory and started focusing on wholesale. About that time, Parker’s Table was just getting their kitchen together, and we came in to do sandwiches there. Jon [Parker] usually has everything we carry and is a great ambassador for what we do.
How many products do you have now? We have about 10 different salami all the time and then other things as we can. We’re in more than 20 Schnucks stores now, plus a lot of wine shops and CSAs. We also sell on our website.
Do you have any expansion plans? I’ve always been cautious about growth and expanding too fast. I think I’d like to be a bit bigger, but I’ve never wanted to be at Trader Joe’s or Costco… For me, it’s most important to make something good that I’d serve my family.
