flavor

Anthony “Biggie” Bencomo is wearing a T-shirt that says sandwich. On most people, that reads as a joke. On Biggie, it feels more like a mission statement. Before our conversation is over, he’ll name at least seven restaurants, recommend menu items by heart, and somehow turn a discussion about lunch into a meditation on community. It’s a gift he’s cultivated over years — part food enthusiast, part storyteller — with an uncanny ability to make you hungry not just for what’s on the plate, but for the story behind it.

That curiosity has led him to launch a sandwich-themed apparel company, host a podcast called Lunch with Biggie, and become one of Central Florida’s most enthusiastic champions of local food. But the story starts much earlier, with a kid who believed a good sandwich was something worth celebrating..

“I’ve always been obsessed with sandwiches,” he laughs.

Growing up, sandwiches weren’t a staple. His father loved them. His mother, not so much. As a self-described “husky kid,” Biggie lived on tuna in Tupperware and carefully portioned snacks. An actual sandwich felt rare. “It was a treat,” he says.

These days, he jokes that his life can be measured in them. “When I travel, I have one rule: eat at least one sandwich a day,” he says.

He keeps running lists of restaurants to visit. Friends send recommendations. Strangers tag him in photos. Somewhere along the way, his enthusiasm became so well-known that people started assuming he owned a deli. He does not.

In fact, one of the most endearing things about Biggie is that he isn’t a chef or a restaurateur. He’s simply a fan — genuinely curious, endlessly enthusiastic, and constitutionally unable to discover something great without telling everyone else about it.

That enthusiasm, it turns out, was also an outlet for something deeper. After more than two decades in the corporate world, Biggie found himself wrestling with a feeling many people recognize but few know what to do with. Life was good. The career was stable. The responsibilities of adulthood were being met.  And yet… “I loved our life, I told my wife, but I’m dying creatively.”

Her response was simple: What would you do if you won the lottery?

The answer came almost immediately: sandwiches and T-shirts.

That conversation became the catalyst for Deli Fresh Threads, a sandwich-themed apparel company that is both niche and strangely universal. Orders arrive packaged like deli purchases, tucked inside brown paper bags with handwritten notes. It’s playful, nostalgic, and entirely unnecessary, which is precisely the point.