‘I’m just ready for a change.’ Voltaco’s owner counts down the Jersey Shore takeout shop’s final days.
Voltaco’s closing in Ocean City, N.J., is not about money or the pandemic. Jeff Taccarino wants to see his boys grow up. And while the business is for sale, the Voltaco's name is not.
For the last three decades, the people of Ocean City, N.J., have gathered on Asbury Avenue on the Saturday of Columbus Day weekend for a massive fall block party. The next day marks the end of the year for many seasonal businesses on the island, including Voltaco’s, the little Italian takeout shop a block away.
But this is the last season for the Taccarino family, which has owned at least part of Voltaco’s since 1954, when two Italian-born cousins, Rose Volpe and Theresa Taccarino, merged their names and opened on West Avenue near Ninth Street. Voltaco’s sandwiches and platters have sustained generations of day-trippers, weekly renters, and Shore house owners who keep it on speed-dial.
Voltaco’s closing after Oct. 9 is not about money or soft sales or rising prices or the pandemic, factors that have befallen many small businesses.
It’s about Jeff Taccarino, grandson of Theresa, who has worked there for 30 of his 42 years. Taccarino decided that he’d had enough. Voltaco’s would close. His parents, Joseph Sr. and Victoria Taccarino, are retiring to Florida.
“I had a lady in here yesterday,” Taccarino said last week, shortly after the news sent TV cameras to the door. “She’s giving me the business over closing, telling me how crazy I am. I should be continuing it on, and ‘why is nobody else doing it?’ And I said, ‘We make a really good living here. We’re very fortunate for that. But it’s not just about the money. What’s the point of doing all this if I can’t enjoy the fruits of my labor?’ I work my tail off and I miss my son who’s 13. He was in the summer hockey league. I missed his games, and I remember my dad missing my ball games, and that’s just the way it was. But I remember what that felt like as a kid, and I don’t want my kids to feel like that. I don’t want to miss out on stuff with my 2-year-old son, either.”
“If I had to put it into one sentence,” he said, sounding like one of the countless Americans who took stock of their lives in the last two years: “I’m just ready for a change.”
“I’m not old,” he said. “I’m not young, either. I don’t want to keep going until I’m in my 50s and then decide that I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t think this is what my oldest wants to do. With my parents in their 70s and ready to retire, there’s nobody behind me. I could do it by myself, but 13- to 14-hour days would turn into 18-hour days.”
Since the announcement, business has exploded with customers seeking their last meals. “It’s honestly flattering,” Taccarino said. “It’s amazing to see both the outpouring of support from my customers and from my employees.”
The wait for a table has grown — sometimes an hour and a half, sometimes even two. “People just smile and say, ‘OK, we’ll come back,’ and they do. It’s amazing.”
Their reaction can be chalked up to a combination of reasons. “People have an emotional attachment to Ocean City,” Taccarino said. “You’ve been coming here as your vacation spot, your second home. People have an emotional attachment to food. People have an emotional attachment to their families. You got all those three things here. People come down, ‘my grandparents brought me here, and now I’m here with my grandkids.’ I know it’s that way. When I go somewhere, like for me the Crab Trap [in nearby Somers Point], my grandparents brought me there, so it’s special to me. Food, the beach, and family. It’s all attached to people’s heartstrings.”
He made it clear that although the family would list the building and the business, the Voltaco’s name is not for sale. “We built a legacy for ourselves,” Taccarino said. “What I don’t want is to sell the name and have somebody do something to that name.”
Time and again in mom-and-pop businesses, he said, “the original family sells and they [sell] the name. Then in a year, three years, five years, 10 years — to you, the customer who’s been coming here for decades, the name no longer means what it did when it was my family, because of what the new owners did. Even if it costs us a little bit, that’s a sacrifice we’re willing to make to protect that name. The work that was done means something to us, and we don’t want to compromise that.”
But at least no one will have to update their speed dial.
The new owners “can have the phone numbers,” Taccarino said. “I’m not going to need them.”