Gene's Sausage Shop & Delicatessen

Gene's Sausage Shop & Delicatessen came to Lincoln Square in September 2009. It took over the space of Delicatessen Meyer, a German-American grocer that had served the neighbourhood for 53 years before closing in 2007. The business behind it is older. In March 1972 two brothers from a farm village in Malopolskie in southern Poland, John and Gene Luszcz, opened a small deli on West Roscoe Street. It specialised in homemade smoked sausage and other Polish foods, drawing on the family's recipes and smoking methods. The shop served the Polish neighbourhood around St. Ladislaus church. After eight years it moved in 1980 to larger premises on Belmont Avenue. A life-size sculpture of a cow on the sign still marks that store. Gene and his wife Alice built it into a European market with forty kinds of smoked sausage made fresh on the premises each day by sausage-makers trained in Europe. Fresh meat is cut to order from the cooler by butchers. Prepared foods and imported specialties fill the rest of the floor. Their delicatessen was featured on the Frugal Gourmet Show and 190 North. The Lincoln Square store at 4750 North Lincoln Avenue was opened as a second full-range European market in the same mould. It has the sausage counter and specialties downstairs and a rooftop above the shop. Weekly specials run across imported pantry goods, from German curry ketchup to barrel sauerkraut, and the counter keeps to the Polish and German lines the brothers started with.