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"The Best Places to
Eat & Drink at the Shore - It's all in the
family for the Zuccato clan and Bud's Market"
by Barbara St.
Clair
(as printed in the Herald Newspapers, April
28, 1999)
When Ida Zuccato made her
famous ravioli, the aroma wafted through her
little store on 83rd Street in Stone Harbor
tempting customers with authentic, homemade
Italian food.
And in true Old World tradition,
anyone who commented wistfully on just how wonderful
were those smells drifting out of her kitchen
got invited to sample whatever she happened
to be making that day.
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For over 40 years, Ida Zuccato
was the matriarch of the little neighborhood
store in this seashore town first called Zuccato's
Market and later, after her son took it over,
Bud's Market.
Mario Zuccato and his brothers
emigrated from Venice to Philadelphia in the
early 1900's where they opened a statuary business.
Mario was the Zuccato family artist, responsible
for painting the faces on the statues.
Mario and other family members
took an excursion train to the shore one summer
day in 1922, getting off at Holiday Beach in
Stone Harbor. Mario spotted a house he liked
and moved his wife and two young children to
Stone Harbor.
Ida Zuccato, a young mother
with a toddler and a baby, was devastated and,
according to family stories, cried the entire
train trip from the city to Stone Harbor.
Mario made a living as a house
painter and opened a small store - probably
a great year-round addition to the island community
in 1929.
Widowed in 1933, Ida continued
to run the store through the Depression years.
In 1945, Mario, better known
as Bud, returned home to take over the day-to-day
operations from his mother although she was
not about to retire. Bud met his future wife
Harriet in Florida and they were married in
1951.
That same year, work started
on a new and bigger store across the street
from Zuccato's Market. The new store was named
Bud's Market.
For Harriet, a young woman
from Trenton, Stone Harbor, a sleepy little
seashore town in the early 1950's, was quite
an adjustment.
"Avalon was just prairie,
with shrubs everywhere and so windblown",
she said, thinking back to her early days in
Cape May County.
The new Bud's Market prospered,
with Ida still there every day to help out.
In the late 1950's, after years of being alone,
she remarried.
Harriet and Bud's family soon
included three children - Rick, Mike and Donna
- for their grandmother Ida Zuccato Ostenrider
to enjoy.
Both Bud and Harriet remember
their customers through the years as being just
like family. Many of their customers' kids worked
for them summers in the store and, according
to Harriet, their young employees were good
about following the Zuccato's rules and regulations.
Did the Zuccato children pull
store duty also? Sometimes they did, "at
least when surf wasn't up," their mother
recalls fondly.
Ida continued to work in the
store right up to almost the day she died in
1970 at age 70.
"She made the best ravioli
ever," Harriet said of her mother-in-law.
Bud and Harriet tried retiring
to Florida but soon decided that wasn't for
them and returned to Stone Harbor.
"We have sand in our
shoes," they both admitted proudly.
Today, the third generation
of the Zuccato clan is still running Bud's Market
from mid-spring to September
