Italian street food comes to Denver at this new Avanti food hall stall

The classic Italian hoagie has become a staple in U.S. sandwich shops, particularly on the East Coast. But like many Italian-American menu mainstays in this country, you won’t find it in Italy. Over there, sandwiches tend to take a more minimalist approach, with a focus on fewer and higher-quality ingredients. 

Starting Thursday, June 25, Denverites will have the opportunity to get a taste of exactly what that means when Ciao Babe opens on the first floor of Avanti Food & Beverage. The highlight of the menu is a line of Tuscan-style sandwiches that throw the outdated Italian sub out the window. 

Owner Niko Diamantopoulos put the concept together in a matter of weeks once the food stall next to his existing kebab shop, Berliner Haus, freed up after “Biker” Jim Pittenger closed his Bikers & Bakers comeback effort. But the idea has been in his head for far longer. 

Raised in Greece, Diamantopoulos fondly remembers road trips through Italy with his father, sampling and falling in love with the country’s street food. Standing above the other things he tried was a specific kind of Italian sandwich from Tuscany made with a light, airy flatbread called schiacciata [skiah-CHA-tah]. 

“These flavors were always in my head,” he says. “I was getting so obsessed with them that when I was visiting Greece last October, I drove to the airport with no ticket and flew to Rome just so I could try them.”

Schiacciata is similar to a focaccia but thinner and much, much lighter. The top crust is super thin and crispy, almost brittle, while the inside crumb is soft and light as air. It’s a perfect foil for sandwiches because it’s not so heavy as to distract from the filling, yet it has all the flavor and texture needed to avoid being lost. It also has large air pockets great for soaking up any sauce, oil, cheese and other elements you don’t want dripping on the plate.

But the bread is just the start. The other key component of these sandwiches is a rich, creamy, soft buffalo-milk cheese called stracciatella [stra-chuh-TEH-luh]. Used liberally in Italy, stracciatella is difficult to find in the U.S. It’s perhaps best known as the creamy inside of burrata cheese (which itself is just stracciatella cheese wrapped in a thin casing of mozzarella). The cheese delivers a decadent layer of fat and flavor, but it’s so light that it won’t cause the kind of gut ache that eating too much mozzarella can. 

And finally, we have the toppings — mortadella, prosciutto, porchetta — all sliced thin and piled high atop a thick smear of stracciatella with arugula, pistachio and other options like hot honey (a Colorado twist), made to order. All three elements of bread, cheese and meat are imported from Italy — appropriate, since most are next to impossible to find in the States. Schiacciata, for instance, is a finicky dough to make, and even harder at this altitude. 

“It’s just impossible in Colorado to get it this way,” Diamantopoulos says. “I went to a bunch of local manufacturers, but couldn’t find it. I went to Chicago. I went to New York. I just couldn’t get it … So if we can’t get it here, let’s bring it here.” 

He eventually found a producer in Italy who would ship the bread par-cooked in bulk, which increases the price — but you’re tasting the difference in every bite. A blind taste test pitting domestic versions against the one sourced from Italy was no contest. 

Most of the stracciatella I’ve come across on Denver menus is a pale approximation of the real deal. My first taste of stracciatella in Bologna literally stopped me mid-sentence, stricken with awe, and to this day I still can’t remember what I was talking about before that bite; Ciao Babe’s imported version is about the closest I’ve tasted yet to the real deal. 

The rest of the menu is rounded out with bowls of Roman pastas — cacio e pepe, carbonara and amatriciana — all made with proper pork cheek guanciale rather than a pancetta substitute. You have the option to add guanciale to the cacio e pepe, technically turning it into a gricia. Diamantopoulos is also playing around with Italian street food cone culture, in which you wrap a piece of butcher’s paper into a cone and fill it with things like prosciutto di Parma, arancini and so on. 

But be warned: If you come to Ciao Babe, come with an open mind and a willingness to try new things. Ciao Babe’s motto is “Italian Soul. Zero Apologies,” which Diamantopoulos says is a nod to doing things a specific way without making adjustments. 

“It basically means this is our food,” he says. “If you don’t like it, go somewhere else. We don’t want people coming here and thinking that this is Subway. This is the sandwich. If you have an allergy, we’ll happily remove an ingredient, if we can accommodate that. But I’m not gonna take the prosciutto and put it on the porchetta sandwich or the porchetta on the prosciutto. These are built a certain way with certain flavor profiles in mind, and we’re gonna just keep it that way.”

Ciao Babe is located at 3200 Pecos St. and will be open from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday.