With monumental meatballs, packed pizza, Gendusa's in Kenner feeds you twice

Emily Brockhoeff knows her regulars at Gendusa’s Italian Market, so she can spot new faces quickly. She knows what they’re in for, even if they don’t.

“I don’t tell them, and they wouldn’t believe me anyway,” said Brockhoeff, a waitress at the Kenner restaurant. “When they order the meatballs, they just have to find out for themselves. It’s part of the experience.”

Gendusa’s meatball is monumental. The size of a softball, it weighs a pound after cooking. It’s all beef, though the fine-ground texture is so soft, you’d swear it was blended with veal. It’s draped with a smooth, gentle, slightly sweet sauce closer in color to burgundy than tomato. You can get one for five bucks, or two over a heap of spaghetti for $14.

Either way, this meatball will show you exactly how Gendusa rolls.

Proprietor Troy Gendusa doesn’t just serve Italian food, he serves joyful Italian food. It’s all about big portions and big flavors, drawn to a familiar template of red sauce and stretchy mozzarella, pasta and sausage, pizza and lasagna, but here it always comes with a personal touch. That touch is two-fisted gusto.

Gendusa is a man who is serious about food and who is clearly having fun with it, too. Get him to take a break, get him to sit down for a minute with his apron bound around him, and he recounts the breathtaking amount of garlic he uses, how his portions keep growing and his penchant to take things to another level.

Gendusa makes it all sound like a force of nature, like the weather, something he can try to manage but is powerless to stop.

“It’s just the way we do things; we’re Italian,” he said. “You hang out with me, you’re going to die a little sooner, you’re going to be a little fatter, but you’re going to be happy.”

His regulars are living happy enough these days. Gendusa’s is inexpensive, and a BYOB policy with no corkage helps keep bills low. Nothing on the regular menu is over $20, and most dishes can easily provide two servings.

“If you leave here hungry, there’s something wrong with you,” said Terry Miguez, who was eating sandwiches and pizzas at a six-top table of co-workers one afternoon.

They still remember the day their buddy Terry Glorioso polished off a muffuletta in one sitting here, a feat that seems both impressive and somewhat reckless given Gendusa’s benchmarks for size.

The only thing small at Gendusa’s is the building, an old clapboard storefront that once housed the Kenner post office. Now it’s a bright spot for the Rivertown district, where too few of the surrounding storefronts and one-time restaurants are active anymore.

But Gendusa’s buzzes. On steak night (Thursdays), there’s a grill outside firing off rib eyes and filets and gargantuan porterhouse steaks. Regulars know the weekly specials by heart. On Wednesdays some file in just for calf liver and onions, an old-fashioned dish still in rotation here.

All around, there's a handmade feel of a place that evolved piece by piece. The decor mixes a motif of vintage gangster photos (with a Tommy gun decal on the door) and St. Joseph statues, with a bottle of holy water kept ready in the kitchen.

If Gendusa's accent didn’t give it away, his family name surely reveals his New Orleans roots. His cousin Jason Gendusa is the fourth-generation proprietor of John Gendusa Bakery in Gentilly, which dates to 1922 and is among the last remaining makers of traditional po-boy bread.

Naturally, John Gendusa Bakery supplies the restaurant’s bread, except for the Cuban loaves made in-house for the Tuesday special, a Cuban sandwich.

On paper it sounds traditional — ham, Swiss, pickles, mustard and roasted pork, which is based on a recipe from Gendusa’s mother-in-law, a native of Cuba.

The end result, though, is textbook Gendusa. Even pressed, this sandwich is stacked. It tips the scales at two pounds. The pork bursts with flavors of lime and garlic from an island criollo marinade. Most people leave with half the sandwich in a box for later.

Gendusa makes fresh pasta — the slurpable fettuccine, the springy radiatori — and fields a menu of po-boys, chicken parm, stuffed artichokes and fried eggplant.

The pizza is one of the calling cards, with a thin, cracker-crisp crust and toppings applied with all the subtly of a landslide.

One, dubbed "the Sicilian," crunches with Vidalia onions between mushrooms and pepperoni, roasted garlic cloves and olives and the key ingredient: Italian sausage. It is not crumbled or ground or sliced. Instead, smashed hunks of sausage are dropped raw onto the pizza to cook together with the dough and other toppings.

“That way, where do the juices go?” Gendusa asked. “As it cooks, they go right into the pizza, right where you want them.”

None of this was supposed to happen. Now 51, Gendusa operated a few restaurants through the years but thought he was done with the business.

He worked as a commercial fisherman, catching shrimp and crabs on Lake Borgne. He worked in heavy construction too. When he started Gendusa’s Italian Market in 2015, it was supposed to be a weekend side gig. It was also supposed to be a market, with a coffee bar and a dessert case and some specialty groceries, something between Nor-Joe’s and Angelo Brocato maybe.

But his customers wanted more.

“They wanted a muffuletta, so OK, we can make a muffuletta. Then it’s lasagna they want. Now we’re cooking, then I get the pizza oven from a friend, now here we are,” said Gendusa, again sounding helpless to resist this fate.

“I just try to listen to people and give them what they want,” he said.

Gendusa’s Italian Market

405 Williams Blvd., Kenner, 504-305-5305

Lunch and dinner daily

This story is part of the Where NOLA Eats series on neighborhood restaurants in New Orleans and the surrounding area. Do you know a restaurant whose story should be told? Let me know at imcnulty@theadvocate.com.