A hoagie shop in Fishtown didn’t stay a hoagie shop. It became a landlord to an idea it never asked for, and neither story makes sense without the other.
Cara Jo Castellino did not grow up rolling meatballs at a nonna’s elbow. She grew up in Northeast Pennsylvania, studied photography in Savannah, and moved to Fishtown wanting a hoagie she couldn’t find anywhere in the neighborhood. So she built one, then built a store around it, and put her own last name on the sign. The precision is the tell. Meat sliced to order. Oil dragged sideways across the roll instead of end to end, so the bread survives the walk home. That’s not inherited technique, it’s a photographer’s eye for composition, applied to a sandwich. Out back, in what used to be a water ice stand, Castellino and her husband Matthew Barrow let a former employee open Last Abuela, a Mexican pop-up, inside their Italian grocery’s own footprint. The market was never trying to be a shrine. It was trying to be useful, and useful things tend to make room.
That room, eventually, went to Hayden Loiseau. He’s 26, his surname isn’t Italian, and there’s no grandmother’s kitchen anywhere in his story. What he has instead is a broken leg from a skiing accident that emptied his schedule, and a month in Rome watching a stranger hand roll dough in a restaurant window. He talks about that moment in oddly clinical terms, air bubble distribution, gluten formation, less an awakening than an engineer clocking a better tolerance. He went home, had a mattarello custom built to match what he’d seen, and worked hoagie mornings at Castellino’s until he knew the owners well enough to ask about the window out back. In July 2025 it became his and Fishtown Pasta was born. He mixes dough before sunrise, by his own admission a morning person, doing wedding soup and sandwiches on the days that feel weather appropriatte.
Castellino’s was never built to be a single, closed story, and Loiseau is proof that it doesn’t need to be. He isn’t claiming inheritance any more than Castellino did. He’s claiming craft, and the market that let him in already spent a decade arguing that craft is enough. If either one disappeared, Fishtown wouldn’t just lose a sandwich or a bowl of tagliatelle. It would lose the evidence that a tradition can be earned from the outside, one window at a time, as long as somebody’s generous enough to leave it open.
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