Gustiamo Gets Right to Business

On Saturday, my friend Sam and I shuffled over to the west Bronx warehouse of Gustiamo, the Italian import business that sells to both restaurants and specialty stores. The importer was hosting an open-house; as it only happens twice a year, this is a special event for people who claim their life was transformed by Nettuno’s anchovies. (Mark your calendars: The next one is November 28th.) When we arrived, Jimmy Coponi—who runs the New Jersey pizza pop-up Coponi’s—was turning out piping hot pies. Inside, Domenica Marchetti presided over a table of cookies from her book, Italian Cookies. Gustiamo’s founder Beatrice Ughi—the doyenne of the Italian pantry—was flying around. When I said hello, she got right to business: “Do you want to do the taste test?” We couldn’t say no.

Founded in 1999, Gustiamo was part of the first wave of e-commerce companies. Ughi, its founder, is a strongly-opinionated child of Rome who is without a doubt the most charismatic former accountant I’ve ever met. When we first introduced ourselves over a decade ago, I had recently seen The Great Beauty—Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 movie about an aging writer in Rome, so of course I asked her about it. As I remember, she waved it off and told me something along the lines of, “I lived that.” (By which she meant, Rome.) Also, that she had grown up on Fellini. Fair enough. Over the last 25 years, she has turned Gustiamo into an essential destination for the highest quality Italian imports. In 2023, she was recognized by the Italian government with the Cavaliere della Stella D’Italia (making her a Knight of the Order of the Star of Italy).