That’s a pricy meatball.
John “Baby John” DeLutro has seen everything over the years at Little Italy’s Feast of San Gennaro — after all, he’s been working at it since he was knee high to a cannoli.
And the 71-year-old owner of Cafe Palermo on Mulberry Street told The Post that a small but mighty force is keeping the feast honoring Naples going — despite prices rising faster then a pizza dough.
“Cheese is very expensive, milk is very expensive,” said DeLutro, known locally as the “Cannoli King.”
“You can’t charge any more money for these products. How do you charge $10 for a cannoli? You can’t. I’m up to $7.”
The festival, which is expected to draw a crowd of over 1.1 million visitors to Little Italy from Sept. 12 to 22, offers Italian fare ranging from sausage and peppers to Zeppoles to cannolis.
Inflation has driven up the prices on the ingredients to make all these staples, agreed Danny Fratta, the owner of Danny’s on the Corner, a San Gennaro staple known for its Torrone nougat candy.
“When we came back in 2021 and I started purchasing what I needed for this feast, you were talking three times [the price] of what it used to be,” said owner Danny Fratta.
“I don’t want to hear no complaints from nobody about how my prices went up, because everything’s gone up. We’ve got to change this.”
Danny’s on the Corner can trace its roots back to a Torrone stand helmed by Fratta’s great grandmother in the 1920s. It was among the feast’s first vendors, the owner said.
Fratta, 44, who took over the stand from his Uncle Vinny after he died of COVID in 2020, fondly remembers working in the stands as a kid, serving crowds of travelers his family’s delicacies.
The city of New York honored Vincent “Vinny Peanuts” Sabatino with Mulberry Street co-named after him last month.
One of the main drivers keeping the feast alive today is social media, Fratta said, noting the importance of the new generation in keeping the Italian tradition alive.
“What happened was, over the years, the old timers started to die off,” he said. “I used to tell my uncle: we gotta modernize, because a lot of people used to come down [to San Gennaro] and they’re not coming back.”
DeLutro shares similar memories of San Gennaro, he told The Post. He first began working the annual Italian celebration at stands with his grandmother, his uncle and his mother, the latter of whom owned a fish stand.
Eventually, he worked his way to scrubbing muscles to sell at the feast. He fondly recalls growing up on Mulberry Street between Grand and Broome streets with over 50 other relatives.
“Now I’m the last living relative on this block,” he said.
“Has it changed? Drastically,” he said of the feast. “The people changed. There’s no more Italians.”
Sky-high prices aren’t the only challenge for longtime vendors, according to DeLutro, who told The Post that changing tastes and requests for flavors are also in high demand.
“I got seven flavors, but I’m coming out with more flavors,” he said. “Mine is the classic, the original. But all these kids, all these young kids, they want flavors.”
Despite the massive changes to the festival in the years since, the San Gennaro feast remains the “only time in here I see people I haven’t seen over the years,” DeLutro said.
“[It]s] all the people that stick together: they know the business, the culture, the atmosphere, the singing, the music,” he said. “It’s like when you want to see somebody, you’ve got to go to a wedding or a funeral.
“Why do you go to a funeral when you can come here?”