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It is, of course, possible that Giordano’s Bakery, an 8-ft. by 10-ft. shop in a depopulated section of Newark, does not make the best Italian bread in the world. Possibly it is only the best in the New World. Possibly — and I say this to appease those of you in places like Cincinnati or Phoenix — possibly it is merely the best in New Jersey. But this isn’t a position you would want to argue on Seventh Avenue, where the people hurrying between the shop and their double-parked cars tend to be staunch Giordano’s loyalists.

Would they have got out of their remote suburban beds on a raw Sunday morning if this bread were not truly special? Has its moist, chewy middle not induced them to brave city streets where people have been mugged for their sneakers and murdered for a leather jacket? Are the triple-braided loaves not caked with sesame seeds? Does the round loaf not have a crust you can cut your gums on?

“This is the best, you know what I’m saying?” says a customer who has traveled to the ends of the earth, as far as Brick Town and Closter, N.J., in search of the perfect Italian bread. “I like it for sandwiches. Especially with pepper and eggs.” Another customer says he’s been to Italy six times, but this bread is better. Giordano’s bread is the best, even when stale, says a woman in a mink-paw coat and a new Volvo. She likes to grind it up for stuffed artichokes.

But let us stop being coy. Is this not, above all, the bread that Frank Sinatra eats, having 50 loaves at a time shipped to his home near Palm Springs, Calif.? It is. And while nobody on Seventh Avenue needs the Chairman of the Board to tell them what they can taste between their own two lips, still it is gratifying, like an endorsement from the Queen of England. On the wall over the cash register, Sinatra’s picture hangs next to the Pope’s and St. Gerard’s, a local patron.

At 5 on a Sunday morning, the bakers work in ankle-deep drifts of cornmeal, wielding wooden peel sticks to retrieve loaves six at a time from the back corners of the ovens. The crew is polyglot and pan-ethnic. Yolanda, a Puerto Rican, says she is a “born-again Italian.” When Carlos, who is tending the 260 loaves in the brick oven, is asked where he comes from, he looks blank. Johnnie-Mo, a bona fide Italian American who grew up around the corner, comes over to translate. He puts his face close, concentrates, then shouts, “Town! In Peru! Newark, Elizabeth, Kearny! Your hometown!”

“Ah,” says Carlos. “Lima.”

John Giordano and his son Steve are the other bona fiders. John’s father, who founded the bakery in 1913, came over from Caserta, near Naples (“like Belleville to Newark, a stone’s throw”). John now lives in an apartment over the shop. A small man in thick purple-tinted glasses, he sometimes wears a battered fedora, Jimmy Durante-style, and likes to share a lifetime of wisdom, usually prefaced by the phrase “You know what’s wrong with this country?”

Steve meanwhile shuffles back and forth from the storage room to the mixer shouldering 100-lb. bags of flour. He adds some salt, a little yeast, a lot of water and nothing else.

“You put in sugar and shortening,” John comments, “and you’re pretty close to making cake,” which is, along with welfare, one of the big things wrong with this country: its daily bread cannot stand up to butter.

Steve tests the temperature of the mix with a computerized thermometer. “I always went by look-see,” his father scoffs. But he is content to carp on the sidelines. When Steve took over the family business six years ago, he added a rack oven, a rotating oven and a $42,000 overhead proofer, all of which whitened his father’s hair. He also built up the wholesale business outside Newark. He and his wife Monica are tough enough to exact prompt payment, even from dilatory supermarket managers. Hence they were also able to buy their first home not long ago, in one of those distant suburbs where their customers tend to wake up.

Some people are surprised that Giordano’s itself hasn’t moved out. There are, of course, rumors of revival in Newark, but everyone’s heard them before. When a city health inspector shows up, he asks, “Are you going to stay long? The Italians are moving out, aren’t they? I moved away in 1929.”

“You must’ve known the riots were coming,” Steve replies, deadpan.

In fact, the old Italian neighborhood was decimated well before the Newark riots of 1967. An urban-renewal program cleared it in the 1950s and substituted a high-rise housing project, now largely abandoned.

But the area’s reputation for crime hasn’t touched the bakery. This may be partly because Steve Giordano weighs 300 lbs., can muscle around quantities of dough twice his size and keeps a gun. Once he trapped a burglar in the attic and encouraged him to surrender by firing five shots at random in the dark. “I sound like a bad guy,” he says, not too remorsefully. “But that’s the only way you’re going to survive down here.”

Also . . . but how to put this delicately? “They see the Cadillacs pull up, and they think we’re run by the Mafia,” says Lucille Giordano, Steve’s sister, who sometimes helps out at the shop. “It’s a riot.” She says the clientele has at times included people with nicknames like Richie the Boot and Joe Bananas — “All very nice, you know what I’m saying?” But cops come too. “So we’ve got both sides covered.” Along with the taralli and freselli , the shop now sells a big loaf called the “Godfather.”

But it is the bread, not the image, that keeps the bakery going. And despite his hard-line ideas on crime and his no-nonsense approach to business, even despite his hobby, which is drag-racing motorcycles, Steve is a sensitive baker. As the dough swells in the mixer, he pats and pinches it as if it were a living creature. It has nuances of personality for him. A dough can be loose or tight, it can be very mature and full of life, you can manipulate it in the rising to give a softer crust or a richer color. He is a stickler for details, particularly “constant temperature” in the dough, a credo that causes his father to roll his eyes and yearn for the slapdash olden days.

When the loaves are ready to go into the oven, Steve takes a special razor- tipped instrument. With his head tilted to one side, wrist high and pinkie up, he makes four fast cuts in the top of each loaf. “The cut is important to give the bread volume and shape,” he explains, and a sensitive baker employs different cuts for different types of dough. “Yeah, I’m very dainty,” he adds, not believing it for a minute. Then he puts the knife between his teeth and snatches the tray out from under the bread like a magician pulling a tablecloth from a set table.

The bread that comes out of the oven looks so good that most customers buy more than they need. A rent-a-cop with a piece of tarallo already broken off between his teeth grabs a bastone and says, “Ah, gimme one of these too.” When a customer with a crucifix pinkie ring asks, “What do you call those things there?” Lucille Giordano says, “You don’t want ’em. They’re yesterday’s.” Or she will shout out to Steve, “What happened to these rolls? They’re disgusting!” But the bread sells itself anyway.

All this is to explain why I drove home from Giordano’s on a recent Sunday afternoon with a huge bag of bread in the passenger seat. Halfway to the Newark suburb where I grew up, I reached over to pull off a hunk and, in my eagerness, caught a finger on a jagged edge, with much bloodshed. In more pampered regions, you might consult a lawyer in this situation. You might inquire about product-liability insurance. You might get out the soft bread and the spreadable margarine.

But as I ate my bread and stanched my wounds, it occurred to me that in New Jersey, this is merely what we call crust.

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