Meet Concetta Maceo-Sims

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Her granddad had his secrets, Concetta Maceo was telling me a few days ago as we sat at a table inside the small family-run spice store and sandwich shop on Market Street. You can say that again, I was thinking, given her family's notoriety, but the young woman had something different in mind. Grandfather Rosario, she said, came up with the secret ingredients for making the best muffuletta this side of New Orleans. Rosario Maceo, who died in 2009 at age 91, took credit, in fact, for bringing the muffuletta to Galveston.

If you know anything at all about the island city, you're likely to know that spice and the Maceo family go together - spice of a different sort, that is. The best-known of the Maceo brothers - Rose and Sam - were immigrants from Palermo who arrived in Galveston from New Orleans in 1910. Working initially as barbers, they got into bootlegging in the early years of Prohibition and soon discovered that peddling illegal booze was a lot more lucrative than paring whiskers and hair. In 1926, they opened the Hollywood Dinner Club and later the renowned Balinese Room. Built out over the water with the front entrance on the Seawall, the Maceos' club was known for its superb cuisine, its big-time entertainers - Guy Lombardo, Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, among others - and for a high-stakes casino operation that managed to defy Texas Ranger raids for three decades. Texas Attorney Gen. Will Wilson finally shut them down in 1957; by then, the Maceos had transferred most of their enterprises to Las Vegas.

The Maceos were an organized-crime syndicate, to be sure, but "they were good gangsters," a Galveston native told me a few days ago. As Robert Draper put it in Texas Monthly in 1997, "Genteel Sam and whip-smart Rose brought a glamorous cachet to the Island, kept out the Chicago mob, discouraged the residents from gambling, donated to charities great and small, and propped up the town's economy - which helps explain why many still view the wide-open era as Galveston's moment of greatest glory."

Birth of the muffaletta

Concetta Maceo, 27, professed to know little about her family's colorful past, but she was eager to tell me about the Maceo Spice and Import Co, founded by her grandfather in 1944. Rosario Maceo - also known as Rose, R.S. and "Slick" - was born in New Orleans, the son of Frank Maceo, younger brother to Sam and Rose. As a boy of 6 or 7 in New Orleans, he hung out with his great-uncle, Tony Lavoi, a Palermo native who allegedly created the muffuletta in about 1906.

Galveston columnist Bill Cherry, a friend of Rosario's, has written that Lavoi would take the broken olive pieces and oil from the bottom of the barrels, spread them on a round baguette, add thinly sliced cheeses, along with salami, ham and provolone, "then douse the whole thing with a mixture of red wine vinegar, olive oil and finely chopped garlic." The Italians called the crusty round rolls "muffas." Lavoi called his sandwich a muffaletta.

Rosario Maceo told the Chronicle some years ago that Lavoi peddled his signature sandwiches from a wooden pushcart at the corner of Royal and Dumain; they were wrapped in the pages of the New Orleans Picayune. Rosario said his great-uncle supplied six or eight muffuletas a day to Central Grocery, the famous New Orleans shop that's often credited with inventing the muffuletta. (The facts are a little foggy.)

They 'flew off the shelf'

The Maceos moved to Galveston in 1910, and Rosario would eventually work for his uncles as a Balinese Room pit boss. He also owned a fleet of six shrimp boats, and after shrimping faltered, started importing spices and other goods. In 1973, Rosario's son Ronnie opened the Turf Tap Room and Grill in Galveston and needed a sandwich on the menu. Rosario recalled his Uncle Tony's recipe and began making the muffuletta. The younger Maceo was interested in spices, as well, and got into blending. He started out selling his spice blends wholesale to restaurants and hotels in Galveston and Houston and in the mid-1990s, began packaging them for retail. "They just flew off the shelf," Concetta Maceo recalled. The shop continues selling to wholesale customers around the country.

Rosario Maceo retired at age 85. "He stayed home for about three days, got stir-crazy and came back to the shop," Concetta recalled. Son Ronnie diplomatically explained that the spice business was under control and suggested, since he'd always loved to cook, that he make muffulettas.

"Every morning grandfather would come in, he'd make 10 muffulettas and he'd be done," Concetta said. "He wouldn't tell anybody the recipe. He wouldn't let anybody help him. They would sell out before 11 o'clock."

Real-life spice queen

They're still selling out, for good reason. Customers drop by the little whitewashed-brick storefront a block from the cruise-ship docks, open the door to a wafting fragrance of spices and sit down at a table among the high shelves to enjoy what could be the best muffuletta in Texas. Chronicle restaurant critic Alison Cook has said it's the "sharp olive salad, bouncing with capers and herbs" that makes the Maceo muffuletta particularly good. Something makes it bounce, for sure. Several other sandwich offerings, particularly "the BOI," are just about as good. Invented by a Galveston police officer, the BOI combines homemade pesto, roasted red pepper, capocollo, baby Swiss cheese, sopressata, provolone, balsamic glaze and Italian seasonings on ciabatta bread. Concetta says her homemade spaghetti and meatballs will be on the menu before too long.

Ronnie Maceo, 67, thought about selling out last year and retiring to the beach - he's had health issues - but his daughter dissuaded him. "It's always been a passion of mine, since I was a little girl," Concetta said. "I would stack the boxes of bulk spices until I had a little throne, and I would play queen of the spices."

She's a real-life spice queen these days. As she stands behind the counter, that's not a scepter in her hand, but a muffuletta fit for a king.

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