Meet the ultimate handmade meatball

A devotion bordering on the sacred can attach to a properly made (or perhaps familiarly made) meatball, its specific dimensions and manner of browning, its tenderness and level of grated cheese signaling that, for a moment at least, one thing can be relied on to be what it is supposed to be in this world.

This is not the case, of course, with so-called novelty meatballs, stuffed with feta or pine nuts or composed of exotic meat. It is the unwavering character of a meatball that is its chief asset - character and predictability and consistency.

Nowhere is this cultish attachment stronger than in the precincts bordering South Ninth Street. So it is no wonder that among the denizens of these once solidly Italian neighborhoods (and emigres therefrom) a poster in a storefront two cheese shops north of Villa di Roma has been the cause of no small amount of attention.

"Gravy, meatballs and more!" it announces. And sometime at the end of August, more likely in September, that is exactly what will flow from the long-vacant space, a storeroom for years for the nearby restaurant that is fitting it out into a new production kitchen (with a small retail counter).

The restaurant is Villa di Roma, the old-school red gravy house the DeLuca family has run in the Italian Market since 1963. It has a problem: Every single meatball (and all the red gravy) is made each morning on the butcher-block counter in its compact kitchen, which dictates that cooking for lunch cannot progress until the meatball-making concludes.

The meatball-making is the province of one man and only one, Basil DeLuca, 56, the middle of the three sons of Domenic ("Kaiser") and Carmela, Villa di Roma's founders. Basil does not merely oversee the meatballs; he hand-forms each one - up to 400 a week - singularly and painstakingly and possessively at that counter.

They have become beloved meatballs. And while cooking may not have been the life Basil would have chosen if his father had not mandated it, he is proud of these meatballs - made to the precise standards of his tutor, Uncle Sammy - and of the following they now have.

Each morning before sunrise, he makes his great pots of gravy from cans of Saporito tomatoes, oil, fresh parsley, garlic, and chopped onion for sweetener (but no oregano; oregano goes in the marinara, not the gravy).