Eataly

Sorrento’s manager Anthony Arpino scribbled on a note pad as he sat hunched over a tall table, tucked between the front window and a case teeming with boxes of fresh ravioli. To the casual observer, it would seem as if Arpino — wearing a black Kangol wool hat, white shirt, gold chain, checkered chef pants and green Crocs — was updating his inventory list, jotting down items like the imported pasta and cans of imported tomato sauce that are ubiquitous throughout the store.

But as business slowed down on a Friday afternoon, and Umberto Tozzi’s classic Italian tune “Ti Amo” blared through the speakers, Arpino, 45, finally had a few minutes to himself.

“I’m doing my homework,” he said, adding that when he’s not helping customers, cutting meat or making pizza in the recently installed brick oven, he is a European language major at Queens College. “Maybe one day when I turn into an old man, I’ll become a professor,” he joked.

Arpino, a Brooklyn native, admits that it’s difficult to label Sorrento’s, at 225 W. Park Ave. On the one hand, it’s a specialty butcher shop with high-quality meat and homemade sausages dangling in the freezer and large legs of Prosciutto di Parma hovering over the counter, an Italian deli and a café and pastry shop, where homemade cannoli, ricotta cheese cake and tiramisu adorn the display case. And then, of course, there’s the pizza, which is becoming increasingly popular, Arpino said.

Sorrento’s is arguably one of the best kept secrets in Long Beach, and perhaps the only artisanal Italian marketplace of its kind in the city. Arpino’s father, Pasquale, a longtime butcher who owns and runs the store with his son, opened the business in 1999.

“When we started, it was really just a butcher shop,” he said. “But we began adding different things. People would always ask, ‘are you making chicken cutlets, or eggplant?’”

When a business next door closed in 2009, the Arpinos expanded the shop, and added tables, a pastry case, and, of course, the 1,500-pound brick oven. Ever since, Sorrento’s is now known not only for its specialty meats, imported Italian foods and homemade mozzarella, but its pizza as well.