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Pesto’s has been open in a Hazeldean Road strip mall since 1994, launched by Robert and David Nicastro, two sons of one of the founders of Nicastro’s Specialty Foods on Merivale Road, who later opened the Il Negozio Nicastro stores on Bank Street and Wellington Street West. Now, Pesto’s is owned and operated by another second-generation son, Michael Nicastro, who was the chef at the now closed Caffe Ventuno inside the Wellington West Nicastro for several years.

Like other Nicastro family businesses, Pesto’s is a grocery store as well as eatery, with olive oils, dried pastas and other imported Italian foodstuffs along two small walls. But the action, especially at lunch, has to do above all with sandwiches, with regulars frequently filling the venue’s 30 or so seats at its small tables and granite counter.

I’m a big fan of Pesto’s house-made porchetta sandwiches, with the thinly sliced roast pork served either warm with peppers and onions, or cold. Either way, the deeply flavoured meat has been piled high inside a crusty, puffy bun, and occasionally a morsel of crackling has crept in. After several of these beauts, it’s been hard for me to order anything else at the deli.

Not surprisingly given how tasty the porchetta is, selling it in large quantities has grown into a separate catering business for Nicastro, which he calls the Bootleg Porchetta Company. The pork is sourced locally from Lavergne Western Beef in Navan and Nicastro’s artisanal end product is made without nitrates. The same goes for the house-made roast beef, which relies on hormone-free meat from O’Brien Farms in Winchester. The roast beef sandwich was good, but it doesn’t displace its porchetta rival as my go-to.