St. Louis’ Hot Salami Sandwich is Magically Delicious

I grew up far more within the sphere of St. Louis than of Chicago. Though I was born in Chicago Heights and my uncles, aunts, cousins, and extended maternal family all lived in and around Chicago, we moved to Quincy, Illinois when I was still in grade school. And to a Quincyan, the nearest “big city” is St. Louis. While I had fond memories of, and connections to Chicago, it was a 5+ hour drive away, but my Quincy friends and I could make it to the outskirts of St. Louis in about 90 minutes. When we went to see a band in concert, we’d catch them at the Fox or the Kiel or the American. For music festivals like Lollapalooza, it was Riverport Amphitheater. For a good time, we’d drive down and hang out on the Delmar Loop or if we had some money, we’d go drinking at Laclede’s Landing and catch whoever was playing Mississippi Nights on a random Saturday.

So it might be surprising to learn that this sandwich, the Hot Salami, a sandwich that is almost universally mentioned as the sandwich that best represents Missouri in listicles of the best, most iconic, must-try staple sandwiches from each state, the United States of Sandwiches if you will (though Inside Hook cited the Shrimp St. Paul just to be different, while Far and Wide settled on the Gerber)–I had never tried it before this month. In my defense, Toasted Ravs are so good–and St. Louis style pizza so bad–that I never really branched out and tried what other things St. Louis might have to offer when I was younger. And for something so notable, the hot salami sandwich doesn’t even appear on the Wikipedia page about the Cuisine of St. Louis.

By contrast, within a month or two of moving to Chicago, I’d heard about a local hot salami sandwich, the Char Salami from Poochie’s in Skokie, enthusiastically endorsed by my friend Michael in this 2005 LTHForum post. This is a slab cut lengthwise from a log of Vienna Beef brand kosher salami, grilled (not griddled) and served in a French roll cut to fit the salami, often with mustard and grilled onions, though Michael recommends adding raw onions as well. The blackened edges of the salami and the onions are a feature of the sandwich’s flavor, not a flaw, and I recently ended a too-long dry spell by getting one for lunch. It’s a terrific sandwich.

But Chicago’s–or Skokie’s–char salami sandwich is not the same as the hot salami sandwich of St. Louis. For that, we need to look to Saint Louis itself, to the old south side neighborhood where working class Italian immigrants gathered in the front half of the 20th Century, The Hill.

The Hill, St. Louis.

Like Poochie’s char salami, the “hot salami” of St. Louis is not a spicy soppressata or calabrese or ‘nduja. Instead, “hot” here refers to the temperature of the salumi, also called Salam de Testa. “de Testa” translates as “of the head,” and this salami is made with pork cheeks and beef, similar to a mild head cheese though less gelatinous. There are somewhat more headcheese-like products in Italy called “Coppa di Testa.” But in St. Louis, hot salami’s story started in 1918, when Challie Gioia opened a market and salumeria at the corner of Dagget and Macklind on the Hill and started selling housemade sausages, including the salam de testa, now better known as hot salami.

Challie passed the business on to his children, and they to theirs, and eventually in 1980 it was sold to an Irish-American family, the Donleys, who according to the writeups have their roots as firmly in The Hill as any of their Italian-American neighbors. They quickly pivoted the business from market to deli, with a focus on selling sandwiches rather than a full line of Italian groceries and dry goods.

Challie? Or Charlie?

Most sources say Challie, including the post and video made by the James Beard Foundation in 2017 when they declared Gioia’s Deli an American Classic. But if you listen carefully during the video, current owner Alex Donley seems to call him Charlie. Additionally, the Goldbelly listing for Gioia’s Hot Salami calls him Charlie. Gioia’s website itself does not address the issue. I’ve done some searching but any archival St. Louis newspaper articles mentioning Gioia’s from the first half of the 20th Century are sitting behind paywalls that I’m not interested in opting in to. I am making the editorial decision for now to follow the crowd and call him Challie, but I wonder if we are all falling victim to a single foundational typo.

Gioia’s Deli

Gioia’s is located in a residential neighborhood, across the street from a park containing 2 baseball diamonds named after the neighborhood’s most well-known native son, Yogi Berra. The crosswalks, the signposts, the fire hydrants, all bear the Tricolore, the green, white, and red of Italy’s flag. It’s a small place, with a few tables inside and several more on the sidewalks adjoining the building. A single employee working a cash register takes the orders, while several more assemble sandwiches behind the counter, with a kitchen in the back supporting both them and a carryout window on the side of the building.

St. Louisans like this place, and though it was fairly slow when I first arrived late Saturday morning, by the time I had brought my sandwich out to a picnic table, taken a taste, and gone back inside to buy some of the hot salami to go, there was a line 8 deep at the register.

Gioia’s slices the salami thick, and as many a previous writeup has noted, the texture is not the tight, chewy pork of a Genoa or a hard salami, rather it has more in common with a terrine or a coarse pate, fatty and soft, savory but not intensely so, tasting of garlic and black pepper and pork. The Hot Salami sandwich is made to order and served as requested, but their recommended arrangement is pepperjack cheese, spicy mustard, and pepperoncinis on a very good bread roll baked at nearby Fazio’s. Several of the other sandwiches also feature the Salam de Testa, including one intriguingly excessive-sounding number called the Porknado.

But we had several of these sandwiches to get through in a single afternoon and so sadly, we moved on to our second stop.

Joe Fassi Sausage & Sandwich Factory

Joe Fassi’s, from the photos I’d seen online, looked like a bit of a long shot for this article, but I elected to try it anyway. As it turned out, this was a mistake, but it’s very possible there are good sandwiches there to be had. The place certainly had a steady stream of customers ordering sandwiches to eat in or take away with them when we stopped in. It’s clean as a pin, and cute, with a “Wall of Fame” featuring press on some of the neighborhood greats, like Joe Garagiola and the aforementioned Yogi Berra. And they do have a “Hot Salami” sandwich on their menu, served like Gioia’s with pepperjack cheese, spicy mustard, and pepperoncinis.

Unfortunately that’s where the similarity ends. This “hot salami” sandwich features long narrow links of a housemade garlic sausage that I probably would have liked under other circumstances–garlicky, with a slightly funky, sour, fermented flavor like many a salami will feature, with a snap like you’d expect from a long narrow sausage like this. The bread was a little less substantial than the Fazio’s bread that was used by Gioia’s, but it was well toasted and the sandwich was constructed with care, the cheese thoroughly melted, the proportions good.

It was not what I was expecting from a hot salami sandwich though. If nothing else, the texture was simply too sausagey. If I were to return to Joe Fassi’s, I’d have to cast assumptions aside and try another menu item. It looks like they can build a good sandwich, but on the day I went, this wasn’t it.

Charlie’s Market and Deli on the Hill

Charlie’s is located just a few blocks down Daggett Avenue from Gioia’s, past Volpi Foods whose Coppa we’ve used previously on the site, past the Italian markets and cafes that dot every block of the Hill it seems, at the corner of a quiet and narrow cross street. The shop itself was quiet, somewhat dimly lit, with some coolers of prepared foods needing a restock and two ladies behind the deli counter, one taking orders and the other making the sandwiches. We almost didn’t order a sandwich here.

Still, we persevered. Like the Gioia’s sandwich, Charlie’s hot salami sandwich is served on Fazio’s bread, with a salam de testa that is made in house fresh. They slice it thinner than Gioia’s but pile it a little higher, resulting in a similar amount of the sausage. Charlie’s suggests that their hot salami tastes great with mustard and cheese, and the cashier asked if I wanted it the typical way, toasted with provel and hot mustard.

A Digression: Provel Cheese

A side-note on Provel cheese: it gets a bad rap. I know, as I’m one of the guys giving it a bad rap, generally speaking. For the most part, I try to avoid saying negative things about the foods I experience. Every regional delicacy or local favorite is just that precisely because so many people like it. If I don’t like it, I generally try my best to experience it as if I did, as if I were one of those local people who enjoy that food so much.

In the past, I have frequently made an exception to this rule for St. Louis style pizza. I even took a crack at it earlier in this article, almost without thinking about it. St. Louis style pizza consists of a very, very thin cracker-style crust topped with a sweet tomato sauce and melted Provel cheese, rather than mozzarella. Provel is a processed cheese with a waxy texture and a low melting point, similar to an American cheese but less sharp in flavor, milder and creamier.

So to begin with, the melting profile for Provel seems, just, wrong for pizza. And that is reason enough, I suppose, to disapprove of St. Louis style pizza. But if I’m being completely honest, that is not why I disparage St. Louis style pizza. My inaugural experience with Imo’s, the standard-bearer of St. Louis style pizza, took place during a time, decades ago, when I dropped my job in Quincy and decided I’d spend the summer bumming around the Delmar Loop in St. Louis. I was hanging around with a friend I’d made on the Loop at his house, and we decided to go in on some pizzas with his pregnant sister. We ordered Imo’s. I honestly don’t remember what the pizzas tasted like or what we got on ours. The only thing I can remember from that order is what his sister ordered: black olive, green olive, jalapeno, and pineapple pizza.

I feel relatively certain that I am the only person in the history of the world who associates that particular topping combination with Imo’s Pizza and, by extension, Provel Cheese. But I’ve never forgotten it, and I’ve cracked jokes about the pizza and the cheese ever since.

But you know what? We’ve had provel on the site before, when we wrote about the Gerber sandwich. And there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a melty cheese, good for burgers or grilled cheeses or other hot sandwiches. It’s certainly a good fit for a hot salami sandwich from Charlie’s Market and Deli on the Hill. Interesting thing about Charlie’s. If you look at the website, you can see what the original business name was: Imo’s Meat and Sausage.

Charlie’s / Imo’s

According to the About Us page on their website, Charlie’s–the retail operation of Imo Meat & Sausage Company–is currently owned and operated by Steve and Matt Imo, whose father Charles started the business in 1971. According to St. Louis Magazine, Charles Imo was a brother of Ed Imo, one of the founders of Imo’s Pizza, which started in the 1960s, and Imo’s Pizza was an early customer of Imo Meat and Sausage. The retail deli operation was only opened recently, in March of 2020, right around the time the pandemic got rolling.

I’m glad they made it through the past few years. If anything, I liked this version of the hot salami sandwich even better than Gioia’s–and I will certainly order Gioia’s again, along with their other sandwiches, at the earliest opportunity. The reason I like this sandwich so much? The bread is terrific, but it is I think the same good quality baguette from Fazio’s that Charlie’s uses. The provel cheese is fine here, quite good even, but provel is an option at Gioia’s as well. The real reason I like this sandwich so much is that I think the hot salami at Charlie’s might be a better, more refined product than the one at Gioia’s. I don’t know that this will make me many friends in St. Louis. But the texture is good, soft like Gioia’s but sliceable, looser than a summer sausage but firmer and more rustic than a pate. The spices of the salami feature black pepper and garlic like the Gioia’s rendition but also warm spices, clove or allspice perhaps, adding depth to the sandwich. Tasting the two head to head makes the differences plain. Both are really very good. But I think I like Charlie’s a touch better.

“Crock Pot Log”

Gioia’s sells their hot salami in bulk, to take home, cook, slice up and serve, in a form called their Crock Pot Log. It is a frozen chub of the hot salami in an artificial casing, intended to be heated in a slow cooker, on low, with a cup of water. I brought one home with me–I also brought a chub of the Charlie’s product home, which was not frozen, but is now, to be saved for a special occasion. I also bought some Provel cheese while we were in St. Louis and I set about creating our own version of the hot salami sandwich at home. Perhaps one day I will try to make my own salam de testa, but today is not that day.

Using sections of Damato’s 4′ extra long baguette–which is every bit as good a bread as that Fazio’s roll but shaped a little differently, risen higher, a little more oven spring perhaps–I assembled our home versions of the sandwich, using pepperoncini peppers, provel cheese, and Dijon mustard rather than the spicy yellow they had in St. Louis.

Then, rather than simply toast it in the oven or under the broiler, I decided to heat the sandwich in a panini press. There are pluses and minuses to this–it makes for a crisp crust and a sandwich that’s hot and melty through and through. It also makes the resulting sandwich a little easier to fit in your mouth. But the bread’s crumb loses some of the texture that makes it so great, and the cheese and mustard and salami also spread out and try to escape the sides of the sandwich.

Still, a pressed hot salami is a terrific sandwich. This toasting method does a really nice job of bringing all the ingredients together into a cohesive whole, the cheese melting into the garlicky porkfat of the salami, mingling the brine of the pepperoncinis and the pungent mustard into the compressed crumb of the bread.

I’m not sure when I’ll get around to cooking the log of Charlie’s hot salami that I brought home with me. I’m not sure if I’ll have any of this Provel cheese left by the time I get around to it. It’s a far better sandwich cheese than it is a pizza cheese, though I am well overdue to reevaluate my stance on St. Louis style pizza. But whether I use provel or provolone, pepperjack or port salut, I’m sure that a hot salami sandwich using either Gioia’s or Charlie’s salam de testa will turn out great.

I’m sure that there are plenty of other purveyors of hot salami on the hill that I missed. Which ones are your favorites? Please tell us about them in the comments!