A story about pizza, hoagies, grief, meatballs, and memory – and a Hagerstown family where feeding you and taking care of you have always been the same thing.
I walked into Cicchelli’s Italian Market and Hoagies in Hagerstown, Maryland, on a Tuesday afternoon in early February 2026.
I was hungry.
Cicchellis is a brand-new Italian market and hoagie shop; it opened in early January 2026.
Like any good Hagerstownian, we like to try new things – and we like to talk about it with our friends.
When I first walked in, it was the music – Italian tenors. Pavarotti. Love it.
Then that wonderful, sensational smell hit me – bread and meat and something warm, emanating from the kitchen. I couldn’t name the combination of smells, but I recognized them somewhere deeper within me, maybe within the soul.
Around 4:30 p.m. last Tuesday, two older women entered Cicchelli’s for an early supper. Their arrival marked my second visit to the restaurant in a couple of weeks. These local ladies acted like regulars, a status they confirmed through their easy conversation with the Cicchelli family – and the fact that no one required any explanations.
I picked up a paper menu from the front counter, a counter once occupied by a Subway. I browsed the selections.
There’s a lot on that menu: hoagies, hot subs, pizza, sides, pasta, desserts – more.
I placed the paper menu on the counter and did what I always do when I walk into a place for the first time and want to know what’s good. I looked at the people behind the counter and asked, “What’s good?”
Matthew, JoAnne’s son – he didn’t hesitate.
Buffalo chicken pizza.
Matthew walked into the back area and cut me a slice so I could try it. He wasn’t selling me; he was nourishing me with pizza he made, a pizza he was proud of – the way you’d offer someone who showed up at your house and asked about supper.
He walked back from the kitchen area to the front of the counter with a slice of the buffalo chicken pizza he just made. He gave me a plastic plate.
Buffalo sauce and ranch on the bottom, cheese, chicken, a drizzle on top, cooked at 475 for five minutes (I think that’s right). I took one bite. Sold.
I had a seat in the restaurant at a table near the front, where the action is, with a view of the entire shop and next to where people walk up to order at the counter.
Out came the pizza.
Matthew then set down a plastic squeeze bottle of ranch on my table – like he already knew that ranch is my most-favorite dressing. (It is).
How did Matthew know that? Come on.
(My longtime pals, Matt and Nick, have a running joke about my unhealthy obsession with ranch dressing. It’s a whole thing. I put it on everything.)
Matthew had no way of knowing that. He just read the situation and brought it out before I had the chance to ask. And I would have asked. I even asked for Old Bay like any lifelong Marylander would.
It’s a small thing – but that’s the tell. That’s the moment where you understand that the person behind the counter is paying attention to you, not just processing you.
And then something happened that I wasn’t expecting: Matthew and I talked. Not for five minutes. Not for the length of a transaction. We talked the way two people who have known each other for years talk. That was my first time meeting Matthew.
Last Tuesday, Matthew, his mother, JoAnne, and I had a conversation, a real one. One that I’ll remember for a long time. I wished that the conversation had gone on longer. We talked about everything: Cicchellis now participating in DoorDash, woodworking, the Miami Dolphins, cheesesteaks and meatballs; the old Italian restaurants that used to be in Hagerstown.
Matthew and I weren’t strangers any longer.
I showed up, had a little bit of lunch (or early supper), and a mother and her son shared their family with me – not because I asked but because it’s their story to tell: how an Italian market with their family’s name came to be in little ‘ol Hagerstown, Maryland.
When I left Cichellis last Tuesday, I took the rest of the pizza home to my wife (she loved it).
And the feeling I carried out the door was one I haven’t had in a long time.
Hagerstown Culture
One of the older women who had come in to Cicchellis for supper around the same time as I did last week was seated at the table across from me with her friend. She struck up a conversation.
Guess what she wanted to talk about? Politics. A local, hot-button political issue.
Not going there. Nope. I’ll spare you the details: I don’t do politics on this blog. Isn’t that a relief?
But here’s what that moment actually meant to me: the older adult woman talking politics was comfortable enough in that room, surrounded by people eager to listen, and she opened up about what’s on her mind. She shared her mind with a stranger, me. And I loved it.
That’s Hagerstown.
The woman avoided her phone and refused to scroll. She sat among other humans and sought conversation. Drive-throughs rarely foster that kind of connection. Chain restaurants also struggle to create it, as algorithms generate their music and managers train staff to recite the same six words to every customer.
Moments like these – real, actual human moments – happen at a place where the room itself offers humans permission to be human, to have human moments.
And maybe that’s not just a quality of the restaurant. I don’t know; Hagerstown has a way about it. It’s the kind of place where somebody walks into a hoagie shop on a Tuesday at 4:30 and feels at ease to opine about a political issue with a total stranger.
That’s not a flaw; that’s the whole point. That’s a community – in its most unpolished, unglamorous, irreplaceable form.
People who tell you their opinions – and that’s just the way it is.
People who know each other’s names, know their hoagie orders, and yes, even their opinions.
Cicchelli’s didn’t create this environment – that’s Hagerstown. But Cicchellis gives it room to happen. That’s no small thing.
For a scrappy kid like me who grew up mostly in Halfway – that is, halfway between Hagerstown and Williamsport – we often think back to the ’90s, our childhood decade, and now we feel like we’re aging when we tell our kids – mine are 19 and 22 – that maybe things in ’90s felt just a little easier, a little less complicated.
Inside the Kitchen at Cicchelli’s Italian Market
Cicchelli’s is a family operation in the most literal sense.
Matthew and his twin brother. They both work at the shop. Want to guess how many collective hours they’re putting in each week?
It’s their mother, JoAnne.
And their father, Ken.
The family name is Mohr, and the restaurant carries the name of Ken’s Italian lineage, the Cicchelli family, whose roots run back to Sicily.
The Mohr family turned it into something with their own hands. Every piece of white vinyl lettering on those restaurant walls, inside their space, is the same height from the bottom.
Every single one.
Matthew sat on a mechanic’s chair with a level, a paint measure, and a thirty-inch vinyl cutting machine’s worth of hand-cut letters, and he aligned them himself. Not because a contractor told him to.
Because Matthew cared about doing it right.
He made the large wooden pizza boards on which the food comes out. He made the wooden spoon on the wall. He does lathe work on Sunday nights in a two-car garage for four or five hours because woodworking is the thing that belongs only to him. Matthew makes chalices, cups, cutting boards, and little containers. He said he forgot how much he enjoyed it until he stepped away to ensure his family’s business at their entry (and beyond) is serving Hagerstown the right way.
Matthew slices twenty pounds of cheesesteak meat by hand every week. He cooks it in olive oil because it’s healthier and because you can taste the difference. He does the same thing with chicken breast, freezing them first so they slice more cleanly in the machine. He tried the pre-cooked, pre-chopped stuff once. Tasted it and said, “That ain’t no cheesesteak.”
A few Saturdays ago in February, the Cicchelli family sat together and rolled a thousand meatballs. Beef and pork. By hand. That’s about a week’s supply. They cook them in the oven, not browned in a pan, so the juices stay inside the casing and the flavor rolls out when you bite into one. Then they go into the marinara sauce.
The sauce is Ken’s recipe.
Ken’s late grandmother, Saveria, immigrated from Sicily; she’s on the Ellis Island immigration wall. She brought the recipes with her, and they passed down the way they do in Italian families. Not on cards. In hands. In kitchens.
The family grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, surrounded by that tradition.
It’s the kind of place where Italian families kept the old rhythms alive, where Sunday dinner wasn’t optional, and the kitchen was the center of everything. That’s what Ken carried with him, and that’s what he eventually brought to Hagerstown.
It took Ken twenty-three years to give Matthew the sauce recipe.
23 years of asking.
And then one day, Matthew learned the secret.
Why Cicchelli’s in Hagerstown Feels Different: The Psychology of Sensory Memory
For me, there’s a reason Cicchelli’s felt different from the moment I walked in, and it has nothing to do with the food being good.
The food is really good. The buffalo chicken pizza is outstanding. The Cicchelli, the family’s signature sub, is the most popular item on the Cicchelli menu for a reason.
While often referred to as ‘anchoring‘ in self-help circles, behavioral science recognizes this as Context-Dependent Memory.
The brain prioritizes sensory ‘composites’ – think scent – because scent bypasses the cognitive filters of the thalamus, hitting the emotional centers of the brain before we can even process the ‘when‘ or ‘where‘ of the memory.
Smell – and by extension, the complex flavors we taste – is wired directly into our limbic system, the same part of our brains that governs our emotions and long-term memory formation.
They are neurologically entangled.
A kitchen you can smell can stop you on the sidewalk and put you back at a table that no longer exists, which is why you remember the meal rather than the date. Because your brain must fire the same neural pathways it used during the original experience, the specific taste of a dish your grandmother made can make you feel, for a fraction of a second, like she is still here.
Cicchelli’s is activating every one of these channels simultaneously.
The Italian tenors are playing overhead. The bread. It’s the warmth from the kitchen, or the visual texture of hand-cut lettering and wooden boards made by the same hands that made your food. It’s the sound of a family talking among themselves while they work. It’s the sound of someone walking to their kitchen to cut you a slice of their best pizza because you asked what’s good, and they wanted you to taste the answer before you committed to anything.
Some businesses spend thousands trying to engineer sensory environments.
What do some businesses do? Well, some hire expensive consultants, some test playlists, and some design lighting schemes.
But something is missing: Authenticity.
What Cicchelli’s has is something you can’t purchase. The sensory environment is authentic because the family is authentic. The music is playing because they like it. The wood is on the walls because Matthew made it. The meatballs taste the way they taste because someone rolled a thousand of them on a Saturday with the people they love.
The brain knows when an experience is real. It’s nothing more simple than that.
Now to geek out: Our limbic systems distinguish between a curated experience and a real one below the level of our conscious thought.
This inexplicable system encodes real experiences much more deeply, which is why those boring chain restaurants often fade from memory, while the family place down the road from Memaw and Pap’s stays with you for decades.
Was the food better there? Maybe not always. But your family liked going there; the staff probably took care of you, knew your name, and you kept coming back. They might even tell you that you gained some weight. “You’d better back away from the table, Ryan,” my deceased great-uncle Jack once told me when I was all but nine years old. My family spared no one.
I experienced something authentic at Cicchellis, even if the moment there was remembering what used to be.
Why Restaurants Are in the Memory Business
Both sets of my grandparents went to Western Sizzlin Steakhouse in Halfway for years. My God, they loved the buffet there -the fried chicken; it was the best.
Remy, the longtime female server everyone knows (forgive me if I’m mispelling her name), used to tell my Pappy Miner that he looked like “Bill Clinton.” He did, kind of; my late grandfather had the perfect grey hair.
Five o’clock on the dot at “The Sizzler.” That’s when they went. They were there. My grandparents’ generation calls it supper, not dinner, because they understood the difference.
I think a lot of grandparents in Hagerstown love and loved “The Sizzler.” The servers who worked there knew your grandparents’ first names. It was like a ritual, fixed in the architecture of their week that it might as well have been a sacrament. At least then I didn’t have to confess to not going to my Holy Days of Obligation.
And Memaw and Pappy Hann loved Bob Evans over by the mall – the one that shut down.
I can still hear my Pap’s aging voice, that deep, gravely voice. He was a kind man. My late grandmother, Maureen – I hear her infectiously silly but ever-so-sweet laugh. I miss their voices – the sounds of two people who were married for 69 years. And the sound of silence – when you can sit there and watch one another, and you just both know when it’s time to go.
To date, I can’t drive past the Fireside in Hagerstown – that’s still what we all call it, even though the name is different now – in Hagerstown without every birthday and special occasion hitting me at once.
Every time someone in my family couldn’t decide where to go, we usually picked the Fireside, over by the mall. Once a family decides a place is theirs, it stops being a restaurant and becomes a room in the house that happens to have someone else’s name on the building. Some restaurants may not fully understand how powerful this is for families.
Restaurants aren’t in the food business. They are in the memory business.
Restaurants are the rooms where families anchor the moments that define them.
Think of a memory at a restaurant – a supper that nobody thought twice about, that became, twenty years later, one of the only things a grandson has left.
Or it’s the restaurant server who refilled your coffee who never knew she was part of your experience, but if she left, you would feel as if someone were deeply missed. Or it’s the chef who never knew how their food helped a family through their darkest moments. Nobody knew except the kid who grew up, drives past a building that’s been something else for a decade, and feels his throat tighten for reasons he can’t fully explain.
Restaurants don’t get to choose which moments become sacred. They only get to choose whether the experience is worthy of the weight it might someday hold.
The Italian Family Tradition Behind Cicchelli’s Hagerstown
When you hear “Italian family,” something may happen in your chest before your brain catches up.
What’s the first thing you think of?
For me – warmth, love, happiness, tradition.
Family.
Or maybe a sense of ritual and tradition that most might be starving for, whether we realize it or not. You might think of someone’s grandmother in a kitchen. Voices that are louder than they need to be because love has no volume.
You might think of directness – people who say what they mean because they love you enough not to waste your time. Hands covered in flour. A large dining table that’s too small for the number of people around it; and that’s exactly right, the closeness is the point.
When someone walks into an Italian market in a Hagerstown shopping center, yes, they could buy a hoagie. But maybe what they’re after – the experience? Or a proximity to a feeling that once was. Maybe the bread does it. The pizza? Maybe the music does it. The fact that the person behind the counter is someone’s son, someone’s mother – you can feel it the way you can always feel the difference between a house where people love each other and a house where people live.
During my visit, I learned that JoAnne might hesitate a bit to take an order from a customer talking on the phone while settling the bill. If she spots you with an earbud talking to someone who isn’t here, I suspect she’ll politely wait for you to finish your call. Once you are ready to connect, she’s ready.
That’s the thing most businesses have sanded away in the name of customer service.
JoAnne hasn’t sanded it away. It’s old-school. And it matters.
“Talking face-to-face again instead of phone-to-phone.” That’s JoAnne’s mission, and she said it the way someone says something they’ve thought about for a long time before saying it to another person.
What Restaurants Can Mean to Families After a Loss
I ask you to pay close attention to what people do in the hours after a loss.
(I write with no underlying wisdom. But maybe I understand grief a bit since “it” fills my days.)
People, families, they gather – anywhere that human nature takes them – after somebody passes.
And when families gather, they eat. Not because they’re hungry but because eating together is the oldest ritual we have for saying “we are still here, and we are still a family, even though the table has one fewer chair than it did yesterday.”
I’m almost ashamed to say that I probably remember every meal I have eaten after attending a funeral. Our family – we like to eat, what can I say?
I recall the food neighbors bring to the house, and the restaurants families visit because cooking just isn’t happening that day. Families often find a place to eat after a loss, other than homes, because an empty home holds a new kind of silence after someone we love leaves us.
When my wife Kimberly’s mother, Leslie, my beloved mother-in-law, died unexpectedly in June 2024, Kim took us to her hometown favorite restaurant after Leslie’s funeral: Reistertown’s Harryman House. This restaurant closed last year – and it felt like another death.
We gathered. We laughed. We cried. We hugged. And we filled our bodies with comfort.
Families go to the places they always went to after somebody passes. Sometimes, families go to places they’ve never been. Either way, it becomes a marker. The place where the family sat together for the first time with the empty chair. Where someone laughed for the first time since the funeral and felt guilty about it. Where two people who hadn’t spoken in years ate in silence, and it was enough.
JoAnne shared something deeply intimate about herself while I stood at her restaurant’s counter last Tuesday. She shared with me that she lost her mother when she was sixteen. She said it didn’t hit her until the day of the funeral – when they lowered her mother’s casket. That’s when she knew it was final.
A woman who lost her mother at sixteen is now building a place where families gather – using recipes passed down through generations, in a place that’s her’s and her husband’s and her kids.
JoAnne knows what it costs when the gathering places close. She knows what it feels like to sit at a table and miss someone so badly that the food doesn’t have a taste for a while.
And the only thing you can do with that kind of knowledge is build a room where other people can come in and feel something warm and real and human for as long as they need to.
How I First Met the Cicchelli Family
I’m going to share something that my fingers can’t seem to write because it’s just too hard to tell this story.
The first time I met JoAnne and Ken wasn’t at Cicchellis last month.
No – the first time I met JoAnne and Ken, it was late at night, nearly midnight, shortly after my grandmother, Maureen, died on Wednesday, July 16, 2025, at a Washington County memory care community.
Anyone who has been through hospice or the death of a loved one in a care community knows what happens next.
There are people who come quietly after someone you love passes on. Maybe you’re standing in a hallway or in a parking lot, unable to move. Frozen. Reflecting. Honoring. Crying.
But you see them come.
And at some point, you realize that two people you’ve never met are about to physically transport your late grandmother out of the care community where she took her last breath, just an hour or so ago.
You might sit in your car. You might not turn the key. Or you might stare at the building because you can’t process what just happened, and your body won’t let you leave because leaving means it’s over.
And all you can think is: what does all of this mean?
What does any of this mean?
Two strangers have their hands on someone you would have given your life for, and the only thing between you and the rest of your life without her is a parking lot that can’t bring yourself to drive out of.
But you have to go home. You have to figure out what to do next.
The people who do that kind of work, who show up in that moment with that kind of care, are a specific kind of human being. They carry other people’s most sacred person with dignity.
They move slowly. They never rush families. They understand that they are holding something that matters more than they will ever understand – to the people standing ten feet away, trying not to fall apart.
It was JoAnne and Ken, in their other professional capacity, who offered my family and me the other real thing they could offer in those moments: dignity.
They kept her dignity.
She would have wanted that. She was a proper woman. And she would have never wanted anybody to see her like that – especially me, her only grandson. The only grandson.
I met Ken and JoAnne in an air-conditioned hallway on Wednesday, July 16, 2025, near midnight the next day. I didn’t know what to say to them, but I tried my best to express gratitude and asked them to be gentle with her, my Memaw.
Ken and JoAnne prepared my grandmother for transport and escorted her to Rest Haven Funeral Home in Hagerstown that night. I didn’t know their names at the time.
I felt their kindness. I knew they treated my grandmother the way I needed her to be treated at the end – and I’ve carried that feeling that I still can’t fully explain with me every day since.
Months later, I walked into an Italian hoagie shop on Shank Farm Way because I was hungry. And I recognized JoAnne behind the counter.
I wasn’t expecting it.
I wasn’t looking for it.
I walked into a restaurant and found the woman whose family had carried my grandmother on her last ride. She was standing behind her family’s restaurant counter.
I went back for a second time and met Matthew, JoAnne’s son, who told me to try the buffalo chicken pizza, went to the back, cut me a slice, and brought it to my table on a plastic plate.
We talked about woodworking and cheesesteaks and his family – and the thousand meatballs they rolled on a Saturday, and the twenty-three years it took him to earn his father’s sauce recipe.
What Cicchelli’s Italian Market and Hoagies Is Really Building
On the wall at Cicchelli’s, there are two clocks – one shows the time in Hagerstown; the other shows the time in Italy.
The clocks – it was Matthew’s idea. A way to keep one foot in the old country while standing in a shopping center off Shank Farm Way.
It’s a small thing – a detail most people glance at and move past. But it tells you everything about what this family is doing. They’re holding a thread that runs from Saveria in Sicily through the wall at Ellis Island through the kitchens of Trenton, New Jersey, through a sauce recipe that took a generation to hand over, all the way to a shopping center in Hagerstown, Maryland, where a mother and her sons serve food to people they intend to know by name.
Here’s what I see when I close my eyes and think about this place five years from now. Ten years. Twenty.
I see pictures on the wall.
Not the ones that are there now. New ones. Pictures that accumulate slowly, the way they do in places that last. A photo of a young man’s birthday party.
A Little League team crowded around a table with pizza sauce on their jerseys. Maybe, even, a couple will get engaged there – because this was their spot, and nowhere else would have been right. Maybe we’ll see a new family portrait, slightly crooked, pinned up behind the register.
If you grew up the way I did, you know what a wall like that means. You’ve seen it before. Not in a restaurant. At your grandparents’ house.
On the mantle. On the shelf above the television. On the credenza in the hallway that nobody was allowed to touch. On the coffee table with the glass top, where your grandmother kept the pictures that told the family’s story. Faces you didn’t recognize. People who died before you were born. Black and white photographs of men in hats and women in dresses standing in front of houses that don’t exist anymore in towns they left behind.
You’d sit there as a kid and look at those pictures, and you didn’t know who they were.
But they knew who you were.
They were the reason you existed. Every face on that shelf was a decision someone made, a boat someone boarded, a recipe someone carried in their hands across an ocean, a life someone built so that you could be sitting on that carpet on a Sunday afternoon, looking at their face and wondering about their name.
That’s what a restaurant becomes when it lasts long enough.
The walls start holding the same weight as the mantle. The pictures go up one at a time, year after year, and eventually the room isn’t just a place where people eat. It’s a family album that belongs to the entire town. People who have never met share a wall. Kids who are growing up right now will bring their own kids in someday and point to a faded photo near the register and say, “That’s me. I was seven. Your great-grandmother brought me here every Saturday.”
That’s the thread.
That’s what connects Saveria in Sicily to a clock on the wall in Hagerstown to a Saturday morning when a boy eats a meatball made from a recipe that’s older than anyone alive in the room.
The pictures on the mantle and on the restaurant wall are the same; they are evidence that someone came before them, that someone fed someone, that someone loved someone enough to build a room and fill it with warmth and say, ‘come in, sit down, let us take care of you.’
Somewhere in Sicily, in a kitchen that smells like the one on Shank Farm Way, families are gathering, eating, feeding, living, remembering, grieving – life, bloody complicated life.
And somewhere on a mantle in that kitchen, maybe there’s a photograph of a woman who left for America a long time ago, whose great-grandson is now standing in a shopping center in Hagerstown, Maryland, making sauce from her recipe, feeding people whom he intends to know by name, putting up two clocks so nobody forgets where the thread began.
That’s what all of this is for.
Hi, I’m Ryan Miner. I write about human beings experiencing life, small-business marketing, artificial intelligence, healthcare, behavioral psychology, branding, marketing, and what actually makes businesses work. I founded Sentinel Silver and The Senior Soup. Email me at Ryan@RyanRMiner.com; text or call me at (240) 244-7075.
