Central Grocery — Muffuletta Origin

A Sicilian immigrant named Salvatore Lupo watched Italian dock workers juggle their lunch — bread in one hand, cold cuts in another, cheese and olive salad balanced somewhere in between. In 1906, he stacked it all on a round sesame loaf. The muffuletta was born at 923 Decatur Street, in a French Quarter that was still a residential neighborhood of family groceries, not yet the tourist district it would become. The sandwich is ten inches across and weighs two pounds. It feeds two. Central Grocery has sold them for over a century, first under Lupo, then his son-in-law Frank Tusa from 1946, and now under Salvatore's grandson Salvador T. Tusa and two cousins. The store still sells the ingredients by the jar — olive salad, Italian and Creole delicacies, and perennial oddities in the front windows like chocolate-covered grasshoppers and bees in soy sauce. Much of the old-world market feel survived the shift from neighborhood staple to national television feature. Hurricane Ida damaged the roof in August 2021. Hurricane Nicholas made it worse. After substantial rebuilding, Central Grocery reopened at the original location in December 2024. Check current hours — the recovery may still affect operations. This is the city's most important contribution to American deli culture, and it's still here.