Cousin Mario's Mays Landing New Jersey restaurant memories

Before 1973, I did not know what real pizza tasted like.

That is not an exaggeration. I grew up in Mays Landing and the only pizza I knew was Ellio's — the frozen kind my mom bought at ShopRite, cut into rectangles, cooked in the oven until the cheese turned slightly brown at the edges. I thought that was pizza. I thought that was what pizza was.

Then Cousin Mario's opened on Harding Highway and I was eleven years old and everything changed.

The first slice

I remember that first bite. Not just the general memory of it — I mean I can actually still feel it. The thin crust. The sauce. The cheese that had been made by people who cared about it. It was the first time food had ever stopped me completely and made me think: this is what this is supposed to taste like.

Mays Landing had no pizzeria before the Giordano family arrived. That seems almost impossible to say out loud — a New Jersey town with no pizza — but it was true, and Cousin Mario's did not just fill a gap. It became a place. A gathering spot. The kind of restaurant a small South Jersey town builds its social life around without ever quite deciding to.

On Friday and Saturday nights through my teenage years, my friends and I would land at Cousin Mario's like it was our second home. We would eat our slices and drink our Cokes and pump quarters into the jukebox. That jukebox was part of the whole thing. Choosing the right song was a serious responsibility. We took it seriously.

The job I almost kept

In 1978, the Giordano family offered me a job. I was sixteen. It was my first real employment — real in the sense that it was not mowing lawns or delivering newspapers. I would come in toward the end of the night, help clean up the place, and get paid for it.

I loved every minute of it.

The closing shift had its own rhythm. The restaurant winding down, the Giordano brothers and their father Mario finishing out the night, me with a mop and the best possible jukebox access you can imagine. I would pick whatever I wanted. Nobody was left to complain.

They taught me how to make subs. They taught me how to make cheesesteaks. They were patient and generous in the way that family-run restaurants always are when they genuinely like the people who work for them.

I left after a couple of months — not because anything went wrong, but because a door opened that I had not expected. WRDR in Hammonton offered me my first on-air radio job. The Giordanos understood. That is the kind of people they were.

I stayed on as a customer for the next forty-plus years.

What it became

Cousin Mario's grew with Mays Landing. They expanded into a bar in the 2000s and with it came live music and comedy shows and the kind of weekend nights that a place earns only after decades of being genuinely good. When social media arrived I reconnected with childhood friends I had not seen in years — and where did we end up? Cousin Mario's. Of course we did. We sat at the bar, listened to music, laughed at the comedian, ordered the pizza that was still the best pizza in South Jersey, and picked up the thread of friendships that had been sitting on pause for decades.

The Giordano family ran Cousin Mario's for over fifty years. Joe Giordano announced the ownership change in 2024 and introduced Omar — a former chef who had worked at the restaurant for fifteen years — as the new owner. The announcement was warm and full of the kind of gratitude that only comes from people who spent a lifetime building something worth handing down.

What stays

There is a specific kind of loss that comes from a restaurant closing or changing — different from other losses because it is not just the food. It is the table where your family sat. It is the booth where you had that conversation. It is the jukebox that played the exact right song at the exact right moment of your life.

For me it is an eleven-year-old kid taking his first bite of real pizza and understanding for the first time that food could stop you cold. It is a sixteen-year-old pushing a mop around an empty restaurant at midnight, completely happy.

Mario and the Giordano family gave Mays Landing something it did not have before they arrived. And they kept giving it for fifty years.

That does not go away when a restaurant changes hands. It lives in the people who were there.