How crappy is the economy? So crappy that Sorrentos Deli closed. image by i can't believe that just happened (2003 photo)

Admittedly, the closing of a small business in North Florida in 2010 is not news.

FLA has been devastated by both a choked-off US economy and a construction industry gasping for breath. There are vacant storefronts everywhere in Daytona Beach; and if you hit a residential area, the "Short Sale" signs sometimes outnumber the typical For Sale signs. Florida real estate has a 150 year history of making men rich and then breaking them back down to a serf-level existence. It continues.

Yet, the news that the well-loved-by-paddock-insiders Italian deli near the track had closed was shocking. While the nearby Ale House and Olive Garden may get the majority of the dinner reservations from the paddock, for lunch, everybody went to Sorrentos.

A dingy place in a barely tolerable strip mall a few blocks from the DIS, Sorrentos was renown for being, as one wag put it, "the best Sicilian deli outside of Brooklyn".

"You tell people about it, and the f***ing line is just going to get longer," said the mechanic who clued us in about Sorrentos back in the early 1990s.

Sorrentos was like Fight Club, because the first rule of Sorrentos was that you never told anyone about it, and didn't talk about it with anyone you hadn't seen there. For years the secret phrase we used as a Sorrentos launch code to get the rental car full of Soup scribes was "time to make a film run".

There were, conservatively, over twenty-five million bench racing stories told at Sorrentos between riders, crew members, some hooked-up fans and the media. It was always off the record, so the banter rarely stopped.

"You tell people about it, and the f***ing line is just going to get longer," said the mechanic who clued us in about Sorrentos back in the early 1990s.

And a line there was, perpetually, running all the way down the deli counter at Sorrentos while the opposite side of the counter was manned by an extended family of semi-always pissed off Italians. It was not uncommon to stand there waiting for your food as an epic multi-generational family meltdown ensued. The grandmotherly patriarch of the family would shriek at least once a visit, "Don-ta sella no slices if you ain't-a got no crust!" to anyone and everyone.

Okay, so it wasn't the Algonquin Round Table but many half-hearted references were made to the "Sorrentos Round Table". Every time I walked in the joint, my brain flashed back to the mental image of Troy Bayliss at Sorrentos. Leaning back on the rear legs of one of their cheap chairs, large cat-ate-the canary smile on his face and beverage between his legs, Bayliss drank it all in after he set pole for the 200 on the Ducati.

The "other Sorrentos", their second location, is still open on the other side of Daytona Beach.