Hoagie Hut

The Hoagie Hut was opened in June of 1969 by brothers Dominic and Joe Porcaro, but the dream of opening their own sandwich shop began about 3 months earlier. Dominic was on his way home from work delivering beer, when he passed by the local ice cream shop, The Dairy Delicious, to see when they would be opening their doors for the summer ice cream rush and noticed a “For Lease” sign in the window. When he got home, he called his brother Joe and the idea of the Hoagie Hut was born. In about three months they turned a little ice cream shop into your quintessential Italian Family Business, where everything was homemade. From the sauce to the meatballs, each recipe was passed down and perfected by each generation and still used to this day.

Over the next decade, Dominic and Joe molded what was once a dream, into a successful sandwich shop. With Bridgewater being a blue collar neighborhood at the time, truckers, delivery drivers as well as utility and township workers would stop in for a quick breakfast sandwich (which they ate in their trucks) and a hoagie for lunch later. With a line out the door that wrapped around the building and a growing need for dine-in space due to the growing number of office buildings in the area, this little hut needed a facelift, but adding on wasn’t an option. In 1984, current owner and operator Rob Porcaro, bought his uncle’s half of the business, but before he could do that, he had to put in the sweat equity. Having grown up around the business, like every child of a small business owner, Rob worked his way up from cleaning onions to doing the dishes, from sweeping the floors to making sandwiches. However, his move to operating the cash register came quicker than even he could imagine when the doors opened on the first day and no one knew how to operate it. He happily accepted the challenge of running the front during their first rush, but no sooner had lunch ended he was back cleaning onions.

Now even before he and his father became partners, Rob could see the need to update the business, but with the building having been built in the early 1900s, adding on to an already old and weak foundation was not worth the cost or eventual headaches that would come. So in 1991, Dominic and Rob decided it was time to upgrade their commercial space and knock down The Hut to build The Hoagie Hut Strip Mall that is there today. It was and remains your quintessential Italian Family Business, where you cannot walk in without seeing family members helping out with the day-to-day running of the business. The Hoagie Hut has served as a daycare, a rest stop, a daily hang-out, a morning meet-up spot, and a landmark in the ever changing Bridgewater, NJ.