Armandino Batali with daughter Gina and her husband, Brian D’Amato (and a few hundred salami).
Armandino Batali wasn’t the first person to bring Italian food to Seattle—that would have been his grandfather Angelo Merlino, back in 1903. He did, however, revolutionize it when he opened a tiny Pioneer Square deli as a retirement project in 1999. Though Merlino’s later evolved into a general distributor, in its early days as a market it sold a selection of cured meats not too different than the ones Batali crafted at Salumi. The founder of Salumi and scion of charcuterie passed away suddenly on November 28, at the age of 88.
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