The names of dishes on restaurant menus often tell stories. Peach Melba, that perennial banquet favorite, was named in honor of opera singer Nellie Melba, for whom uber-chef Auguste Escoffier cooked a banquet in 1892. The Caesar salad commemorates a particularly disastrous July 4th weekend in 1924 when the kitchen at Cesar Cardini's tony restaurant in Tijuana ran out of everything but romaine lettuce, parmesan cheese, eggs, lemons, and croutons. Closer to home, the Buffalo wing is named after the city where the Anchor Bar's Terressa Belissimo created them. But to my mind the most evocative name for a dish that I've encountered, with the possible exception of "garbage plate," is "The Colon Kicker," a hot sub made by Dominic Mammoliti at his 35-year-old sub shop, Calabresella's, on Buffalo Road in Gates.

Calabresella's has the feeling of a neighborhood joint transported to the suburbs. The place is spare yet comfortable, the narrow dining room furnished with an eclectic assortment of tables and chairs, a wide-screen television, and a wall of shelves decorated with bric-a-brac including a model ship, football helmets, family pictures, porcelain figurines, and a framed photo of the cast of "The Sopranos." Most days, Mammoliti's mother, Beatrice, is behind the counter to greet guests personally. To my mind her presence in the store is almost a guarantee of quality: kids aren't likely to slack off when their mom is close at hand.

The meat case dominates the store. Neat piles of Mammoliti's homemade Italian sausage, hand-cut steaks, and an impressive selection of Italian cold cuts and antipasti might well derail you before you make it back to the deli counter where the real magic happens. Mammoliti makes everything at his deli from scratch, offering up a rotating selection of soups (split pea with acini de pepe, pasta fagioli, and chicken noodle chief among them) in addition to the hot subs for which the shop is justly famous. Calabresella's has been in business a long time, and the quirky and hyperbolic names that are attached to its sandwiches are all part of the charm.

The Colon Kicker (all subs, $4.25-$7), named in honor of one of Mammoliti's regular patrons who consistently asked for really spicy subs, is a cheesesteak with capicola added to it, along with a hefty dose of hot pickled peppers and a dash of crushed red pepper to round it all out. It is a marvel of a sub: overstuffed and juicy with a spicy undercurrent that will build on you over time, fully living up to its name. But it's only one of Mammoliti's creative combinations, including the Super Sonic (an oversized Italian sub with extra everything), the Dominator (grilled, roast turkey cut from an actual bird), and the Royale, my personal favorite.

The Royale combines Italian sausage with grilled cappy, provolone, and fried peppers and onions that have the intense flavor of vegetables seared over charcoal, scooped into a crusty roll and dusted with parmesan cheese. It tastes like the sausage sandwich that you always want to find at a street fair and never do. Mammoliti makes his own Italian sausage using natural casings, meat he grinds himself, and a mixture of spices that includes fennel, garlic, and just enough red pepper to get your attention and hold it. The resulting links taste much more like wild boar than the tame Italian sausages found at the grocery store. Deeply flavored but not at all gamey, this sausage holds its own against the salty and deliciously fatty capicola it's paired with, and is delicious in its own right.

Buffalo Road defines the southern boundary of Rochester's answer to New York City's Little Italy. At the other end of Howard Avenue, Lyell Avenue marks the northern boundary, and it's there that you'll find Martusciello's Bread. Owner Frank Martusciello, who worked in the bakery from the time he was 16, took over management from his father in 1978. He relocated the bakery to Lyell Avenue from its original location on Saratoga Street in 1996, in part to gain space for his bakery's burgeoning wholesale bread business (the company employs 40 people and makes bread six days a week to keep up with demand).

Martusciello's is well known for its massively long French breads, crusty loaves of Italian bread the size of car tires, sandwich rolls brushed with olive oil and herbs, and sub rolls that can stand up to even the sloppiest of ingredients. The bakery also offers cakes and pies along with great Italian pastries and cookies - the anise cookies, moist but not cakey and topped with a dollop of rich buttercream, are the best I've ever had. In addition to the usual bakery items, it also creates a robust menu of focaccias, pizzas, calzones, and subs.

Aside from their bewildering size - a Martusciello's bomber ($8.99) could easily feed four people and leave no one feeling deprived - the bakery's subs are pretty run of the mill when compared to a place like Calabresella, where the sub-maker's craft reaches the level of art. Martusciello's greatness lies in its pizzas and calzones - crude-looking, misshapen, imperfectly formed objects so overloaded and abundant that they scream to be eaten.

A pizza heaped with crumbled bacon and scrambled eggs covered in cheese brought the flavors of salt, pork, and cheese together on a crust that had the fluffy substance of a focaccia with the crispy bottom of a pan pizza - crunchy, greasy, and delicious ($3.25). The crust on a meatball calzone, which was leaking sauce even before it went in the pizza oven, barely contained three huge meatballs, sauce, and cheese, cracking open at the touch of a fork ($5.50). For a bakery, Martusciello's does remarkably well with meat. Their meatballs, made from a mixture of veal, pork, and beef, walk a thin line between being meaty and overly dense, delivering good supporting flavors rather than being overwhelmed by the sauce in their calzones and subs.

Similarly the six or seven layers of beautifully thin fried eggplant cutlets inside the eggplant calzone maintained a bit of crunch rather than dissolving into a gooey mess, leaving each layer distinct and allowing the calzone to come across as moist and delicious rather than dense and bready ($5.50).

To find Calabresella's in City Newspaper's online Restaurant Guide -- including a map, user reviews, and more -- click here.

Calabresella's

1386 Buffalo Rd, 235-7860

To find Martusciello's Bread in City Newspaper's online Restaurant Guide -- including a map, user reviews, and more -- click here.

Martusciello's Bread

2280 Lyell Ave, 247-0510