A sandwich deli, inspired by the best of Melbourne

We're asked a lot about the naming of Greenwich Deli and if it’s named after the London or NY suburb?

It not exactly, but kinda...I guess the truth is a little stranger than that.

It begins when my sister and I dropped into an open for inspection, we had seen the house online and thought the corner shop affixed to the house was very interesting. So on the open day we saw the agents flag was out and walked in thinking they were inside. However, we hadn’t checked the open time and we walked in and stunned the lady cleaning, we were as shocked to see her as she was us.

We quickly explained that we thought it was open and that we would come back later but before we could leave she grabbed my hand and asked us to stay and that she would show us around.

See her brother was Harvey and he had recently died and this was his house. She talked about how he would play instruments and loved the drums *later we would think of calling the cafe Drummer Boy

As we were leaving I asked if we could see in the front of the house, the milk bar section that everyone knows. She realised that she hadn't opened that yet, or cleaned it, or that Harvey had probably not done so in very long too.

She unlocked the old padlock but wasn’t strong enough to open the door so I helped her push the barracaded timber door joing the house to the shop inwards. I was honestly expecting a ghost to fly out considering the only natural light was from a small window above the door. But instead of a ghost, from that tiny little window was all this natural light that lit up the entire room, enough to give me goosebumps.

I bought it.

Years would come to pass as the process of permits, building etc but I still didn't have a name. I thought about it everyday, but it's really hard!

You try naming a cafe in Melbourne. I mean there's literally thousands, every name is taken.

And so I knew I wanted to name it something that had relevance to the local area and a little nod to how old the building is and maybe the previous lives/stories told.

From what I could gather the original part of the building, the part that remains to this day, was built in 1920.

So I turned to a website called TROVE. TROVE is a catalogue of millions of editions of newspapers which I had previously used while speech writing.

I started with the phrase "William Hall" as the heritage street sign right outside the door of the Deli says "The site of William Hall's Hobson River Farm".

There were heaps of results but the very first I clicked was from a newspaper called The Argus which ran for 100 years up until 1957. I'll link it below. But the sentence which got my interest read "In 1847 he bought 147 acres at Greenwich (now Newport)".

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/12475288

Greenwich! I've never heard Newport called that before but when I started to look I found a few traces. Like the baseball field at Greenwich Reserve. Or the Greenwich Bay just oppostite.

I contacted the Williamstown Historical Society to see if it was true, and it was.

And so it was decided that it had to be Greenwich Deli.