Famed South Philly Sarcone’s Bakery is passed down to a fifth generation

On the good days, Louis Sarcone Jr. gets out of bed, pops his meds, and heads to Sarcone’s, the famed South Philadelphia bread bakery that his immigrant great-grandfather opened in 1918 in the family rowhouse.

On the bad days — and they’ve become more frequent, six years after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease — he stays home. But he doesn’t worry too much about the brick ovens, or the rolls, or the tiled retail shop.

He knows his son, Louis III, has it covered.

Continuing a tradition into its fifth generation, Sarcone’s Bakery has been handed down from Sarcone son to Sarcone son. Its rolls, used by many popular sandwich shops, are considered the gold standard for hoagies.

The transition from Louis Jr. to Louis III was not some momentous occasion — “like ‘the business is yours now,’” said Louis Jr. during a chat last week in the bakery. “It happened over time.” (The transition was more sudden in the 1950s when Louis Sr.’s father, Peter, quit dental school after his father Luigi, Sarcone’s Bakery founder had a heart attack.)

Like the other Sarcones, Louis Jr., 60, started as a boy, rolling dough. “I worked mainly on the weekends. I was probably the only school student that hated the weekends because I had to come to work.”

He went full time after he graduated from high school in 1982. His sister, Linda, has now done the books for three generations.

“My father would give me a little more responsibility as the years went on,” Louis Jr. said. When Louis Sr. reached his 60s, “in the mid-’90s to the early 2000s, he just basically came and went as he pleased.”

Louis III, who is 37, assumed as a kid that he would take over the business. “I would come in on the weekends and I knew everyone in our family worked here,” he said.

Uncles, aunts, cousins, sisters. “Nine grandkids!” his father said.

“I remember being in elementary school, and you would make a name plate and make you put down what you thought would be your occupation,” Louis III said. “I always put down bread baker.” Coaches and referees who saw “Sarcone” on his uniform would ask if he was related to the family.

Louis III had a decent career as an minor-league hockey player after high school, “but I knew when I was done with all that, I would still come back and be in the bakery.”

In Louis Sarcone Sr.’s final years, his son, Louis, and his daughter, Linda, cared for him in the apartment above the bakery before he died in 2018.

Life was returning to normal when Louis III said he picked up something about his father. “I started noticing he would take weird breaths and one of his fingers would shake sometimes,” he said. “At first, he kept saying, ‘Oh, I’m drinking too much coffee’ and he would slow down his caffeine intake. It got to a point where I said, ‘Why don’t you go get checked out?’”

Louis Jr. went to the doctor who had treated his father. He diagnosed him with Parkinson’s, a brain disorder that causes uncontrollable movements, such as shaking, stiffness, and difficulty with balance and coordination.

It’s progressive. “It slows you up,” he said. “You’re like a sloth. The shaking is just a visual. The medication that you take stops the tremors; that’s it.”

He takes his medications every four hours round the clock, and now drives only during the day because, he said, “my reflexes are not what they used to be. I’m also on a high-carb, low-protein diet. Most people are jealous of it because they love carbs. I’m the opposite.”

“But I’m fighting it every day. I try to come here when I can, but not every day, so I’m pretty much semi-retired.”

Philadelphia, the birthplace of the hoagie and the cheesesteak, lives on its Italian loaves. Great bread, from the smaller bakeries, becomes the stuff of lore. Sarcone’s used to have a deli at the end of the block, run by a cousin, that featured Sarcone’s rolls. (It’s now Angelo’s Pizzeria, where Danny DiGiampietro, a relative and former baker, makes his own rolls.)

At Sarcone’s, the process is the same it’s been since 1918, when Luigi Sarcone, a native of Foggia, Italy, bought the building and business from the Anastasia family, who wanted to focus on its produce business (and still does).

“We don’t have preservatives. We don’t ship. We don’t freeze,” said Louis Jr. “I just did what I was supposed to do to survive. We made a name for ourselves because we work so hard.”

They still live by the clock. Louis III can’t go to sleep until he gets that midnight text from the mixer, acknowledging that he’s at work. Other shifts arrive in the hours as the doughs move through the process, including a two-hour rest to release carbon dioxide — a practice that they swear by.

The first loaves emerge from the oven six hours later. Jobbers, the independent truck drivers who service shops on their routes, start rolling up outside to grab their paper bags full of rolls. The store opens at 7:30. On Mondays, when the store is closed, a small staff bakes off a smaller batch of rolls for a few wholesale customers.

“My grandfather always used to say, ‘Going into a business, following your footsteps, it was like playing whisper down the lane,’” Louis Jr. said. “If you didn’t listen to the fathers before you, something will get lost as you move on, something will get lost in translation, so you had to pay attention to everything that we did.”

There’s a saying that Louis Jr. says over and over: “Don’t put too much food in your mouth; you can’t chew.”

“My grandfather, Pete, told me that when I was a young boy,” he said.

By that, Peter Sarcone meant: don’t overextend. The bakery is still in side-by-side rowhouses on Ninth Street between Catharine and Fitzwater, not in some factory. Years ago, the Sarcones moved the ovens from the basement to street level. They still sell what they make each day. There’s no par-baking, no frozen doughs, no preservatives. They write orders on pencil and paper at the same desk that Luigi Sarcone used in 1918.

They balance a hefty wholesale business against the homespun retail store aimed at the neighbors who crave the rolls, tomato pie, and pizzelles.

Sarcone’s wholesale business took off two decades ago after a customer requested seeded rolls to make a hoagie, “and then everybody started doing it,” Louis Jr. said. “Before you know it, everybody wanted ‘Sarcone’s bread.’ You could have called up any bakery and said, ‘How much is your Sarcone bread?’” In 2005, Sarcone Jr. trademarked the family name.

“I don’t care about growing that much,” Louis III said. “I just want to keep everything the same.”

Family businesses thrive when there’s a child who not only follows the line of succession but doesn’t mind the work. Generations of families traditionally sought to send their children to college to seek a professional career, not to toil for endless hours in the unforgiving places as they did.

South Philadelphia has its successes still operated by descendants after more than a century, such Termini Bros. and Isgro Pastries. At Jim’s South Street Steaks, Ken Silver was selling computer software more than a decade ago when his father, Abner, became sick. Geno Vento took over Geno’s Steaks after the sudden death of his father, Joey. Famous 4th Street Deli could have closed in 1970 after Sam Auspitz took ill, but his son David gave up a job in investment banking to come home and run it. (He sold it 25 years later.)

Sometimes though, families bicker. Ralph’s Restaurant, Sarcone’s next-door neighbor and one of the oldest Italian restaurants in the country, was the subject of a since-settled lawsuit in 2016 involving its name. Litigation dogged the Tacconelli’s and the Bookbinders restaurants for a time.

The Sarcones soldier on. Louis Sarcone Jr.’s sister, Linda, lives across the street and does the bakery’s books. His daughter (Louis III’s younger sister, Amber) helps out when she can, given her wheat allergy.

“A lot of people bring up how hard it is to work with family,” Louis III said to his father. “I feel like you and I get along really well. Obviously, you’re still going to have disagreements about things, but we never leave mad at each other. I just have a respect for him teaching me the ropes.”

“It’s really cool, taking over a business knowing that I’m the fifth one to do it,” Louis III said. “Take those ovens and some of the old pictures. Some things around here are still exactly the same. It’s like, ‘Wow, my great-great-grandfather worked on these, with these same exact machines and ovens.’”

But there is no sixth generation coming up, as Louis III and his wife have no children. “He’s gotta have kids soon,” Louis Jr. said, gently.

Nothing lasts forever, Louis Jr. said. “At my age, now all I care about is leaving a legacy of people who remember us.”

Turning to his son, he said: “I’m confident he’s in good hands for another 40, 50 years. I know he sucked up enough information. I feel confident about that.”