THE housemade mozzarella is the star attraction at Fiore’s House Of Quality, though if you want to pass yourself as a local, you call it mutz. It is also the reason the sandwiches at this long-lived Italian deli – whose loyal cadre of customers included Frank Sinatra, who used to have his mutz flown out to California – are “the best thing to eat in Hoboken”, according to Ira Kaplan.
The Yo La Tengo singer and guitarist is already at the counter waiting on today’s order when Uncut arrives. He’s a man who knows his food – after all, his band have two songs named after hot chicken and two more for crispy duck. Kaplan admits it’s his second visit here in the past week. He says it was probably a few years after moving to Hoboken in 1982 before he first visited Fiore’s and was sorry for not doing it sooner. “The bread’s great, too,” he says, recommending the handful of original Italian bakeries still left.
Once ham and mutz sandwiches are bagged and ready, Kaplan leads an impromptu tour of the New Jersey town on the way to the band’s practice space. Though just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, Hoboken can feel much further away with its low-key streets full of quaint storefronts and brick townhouses. “When we first came here, it really did have that small-town vibe,” Kaplan says. He remembers the sight of the Secret Service men staking out the rooftops when President Reagan made a campaign stop in 1984 alongside Hoboken’s most famous son. “It was probably the only time Sinatra came back to Hoboken,” Kaplan jokes, referring to the singer’s vow never to return after getting booed on stage at the Union Club in 1948.
Though Kaplan and Georgia Hubley – his partner in life and Yo La Tengo for the last four decades – moved to Manhattan in 2014, their history is everywhere here. Still, only traces remain of some landmarks. At the site of Maxwell’s – the legendary club
