Before “Cake Boss” began in May to bring millions of television viewers inside Carlo’s Bakery in Hoboken — where each week inventive fourth-generation baker Buddy Valastro and his colorful extended family make two or three nearly mythic cakes — Hoboken was not especially known to the outside world as a food town, Avi Ohring was saying. Ohring expects that to change, which is why he has created the first and only food tour of Hoboken.

“Hoboken is known for two things,” Ohring said. “Frank Sinatra and the birthplace of baseball.”

“The birthplace of baseball? I thought that was Cooperstown, New York,” I said.

“The first known competitive baseball game using modern rules,” Ohring said carefully, was between the New York Knickerbockers and the New York Nine on June 19,1846 in Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Anyway, food and Hoboken will soon be nearly synonymous, Ohring was saying, now that Cake Boss, which is shown Monday nights on the TLC network, “is currently the most-watched food show on television.”

“Number one, are you sure? It didn’t even make Entertainment Weekly’s list of top 15 food shows,” I said, instantly regretting my big mouth.

“I said currently most watched,” Ohring replied mildly. “It could change week to week, I don’t know.”

The truth is, Ohring said, Hoboken has always been a food town. Even when it was largely industrial, it was the site of food companies like Lipton Tea and Maxwell House Coffee, whose immense good-to-the-last-drop dripping coffee pot neon billboard was the one recognizable symbol of Hoboken to New Yorkers right across the river. Hoboken, he said, was also the city where the Tootsie Roll and the ice cream cone were invented.

(The Tootsie Roll and the ice cream cone?!)

“It was also the home of the first Blimpies,” Ohring said.

Luckily, though, Mangia Hoboken! The Hoboken Food Tour, which Ohring started in July, does not include visits to locations that may or may not be involved in these disputed (Tootsie Roll, ice cream cone), departed (Lipton, Maxwell House) or degraded (Blimpies) pieces of Hoboken food history.

His tour, given every Saturday afternoon, focuses exclusively on current food stores that are generations old, family-run and largely Italian — places very much like Carlo’s Bakery…including Carlo’s Bakery itself, which is the last stop on the tour.

Any one of them, he believes, is colorful enough to get its own television show, and thus generate their own long, long lines. Every day now, hundreds of people line up outside Carlo’s City Hall Bake Shop to buy cannolis and biscotti and cupcakes; few if any are there to order the 400-pound cakes that the show features — in the shape of an extinct mammal, or of a fire engine with a working siren and smoke, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or the entire New York Harbor, including reproductions of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty and Carlo’s Bakery, each of them wired with fireworks (commissioned by the Grucci fireworks family).

“Before I started this tour, I went on food tours in Brooklyn and Manhattan,” Ohring said. “They’re not really behind-the-scenes. Here you see the coal-fire brick ovens and you meet the owners, and you get food to taste.” That is not something you are going to get in Manhattan: “They don’t even bake the bread at Amy’s Bread, and you’re not going to meet Amy.”

It’s a good pitch (as befitting a resident of the birthplace of baseball), and a few weeks later, I went on his food tour, though he was on vacation the week I went, and it was instead led by Melissa Abernathy, his fellow lifetime member of the Hoboken Historical Society.

“Sigmund Freud landed in Hoboken in his one trip to America,” she said, on our way to the first bakery.

“Did he stay here?”

“I don’t know.”

She does know that Hoboken is a food town. “At the mayor’s inauguration in July, several politicians called Hoboken Restaurant City,” Abernathy said. (Buddy Valastro, incidentally, made the inauguration cake.) But Abernathy meant the ex-mayor of Hoboken, Peter Cammarano, who resigned a month after taking office when he was arrested by federal agents, along with 43 other people, as part of an investigation into corruption — another thing for which Hoboken long has been known. (“On The Waterfront” with Marlon Brando was famously filmed on the docks of Hoboken.)

Over the next three hours, we visited, and ate, at eight food establishments. We broke bread at Antique Bakery and Dom’s Bakery Grand, then sampled mozzarella at Fiore’s House of Quality. “Fiore’s is where Sinatra and his family got their deli products from,” our tour guide said. Its roast beef sandwich was voted the best hero by the Village Voice. At the counter, there is a Sicilian salad bar with 17 choices, including artichoke and octopus.

We took a detour to visit Frank Sinatra’s birthplace (a parking lot with a plaque, and next door, the enterprising “Here to Eternity” Museum, shut down by the Sinatra family). Then we got a crazy mocha freeze from Empire Coffee & Tea Co, whose unique selections included an Obama Blend, “a smooth, confident, hopeful mix of Kenyan AA, Sumatra & Kona Hawaiian French Roast.” Empire’s original store, actually, is on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan; on its Web site, they have a whole shtick comparing the two: “As the stores and restaurants in Hoboken (the birthplace of Frank Sinatra and baseball) get newer, brighter, shinier,and slicker, Empire Coffee and Tea Company gets tastier and more relaxed.  There’s a buzz of hipsters, creativists, and generally java cravin’ ne’er-do-wells in and around this place.”

We sampled mozzarrella and tomatoes at Vito’s Deli on Washington Street, which, while not the only food store in Hoboken that claims to make the best mozzarella, is the only one whose employees wear a t-shirt that says “Hoboken’s Best Mutz!”

We ate at Benny Tudino’s Pizzeria, known for the biggest pizza in Hoboken if not the Eastern Seaboard. “The pizza is so big they have to fold it to get it in the oven,” Abernathy said.

The most generous and forthcoming of the proprietors on the tour were the two brothers at Lisa’s Deli at 901 Park Avenue, Anthony and Angelo Lisa, the sons of Caterina Lisa, who founded the establishment in Italy in 1946 and moved it to Hoboken in 1971.

“Now the young generation, they don’t want to cook,” Tony Lisa was saying, in what sounded at first like a lament. “They come home from work, they don’t want to spend another hour.” So, they order from Lisa’s. “We do deliveries all over, even New York.”

The Lisa brothers made mozzarella before our eyes (“the best mozzarella in Hoboken”) “This bowl has water that’s at 180 degrees,” Angelo explained as he worked the cheese. “Then we put the cheese in this one, which has cold water. It chills the outside and keeps the inside moist.”

The demonstration was so visual, with such a range of facial expressions, that it seems made for television.

I asked them about Carlo’s Bakery and “Cake Boss.”

“God bless them,” Tony Lisa said, “the place wasn’t that busy before.”

Would the Lisas do a TV show?

“Nobody approached us,” he said with a smile, a kind of open sweet-sad smile that reminded me of Charlie Chaplin’s at the end of City Lights. “But we’re going to see about doing something next year,” he said, suddenly all business.

As we approached Carlo’s Bakery, the guide was talking on the telephone, looking disappointed. “They won’t be able to give us cannolis,” she said. “They’re too busy.”

However, we did not have to wait on line in the front, which stretched to the end of the block, but rather were ushered to the back, where a group of teenage girls waited outside as if it were a stage door.

Soon, they spotted Joe Faugno, labeled on “Cake Boss” as Joey “the hothead,” married to Buddy’s eldest sister Grace. There seemed nothing hotheaded about him as he graciously agreed to autograph the teens’ t-shirts, and then apologized to the members of the Hoboken food tour for omitting the cannolis and the behind-the-scenes tour: “Our shooting schedule is very crazy. The film crew is upstairs right now.”

Business in general has so improved since the show starting airing, Joe Faugno said, that they have added a dozen employees to the three dozen full and part-time they already had, “and it’s still not enough.”

The hothead stood in the alleyway outside the bakery cheerfully telling a series of anecdotes about cake mishaps and lucky breaks, stopping only to say goodbye to a line of attractive young men and women who walked past us; these were “Mike Huckabee’s people,” we were informed; the former presidential candidate and current talk show host had ordered a cake from Carlo’s.

“If you look at the first shows we did, and look at the latest ones,” Faugno said, “you’ll see how much we’ve evolved.”

Could any of the other food places in Hoboken have their own television show, I asked.

He thought they could. “I think we’re just a microcosm of what’s here,” he said. “Surely if you got to Fiores…if you go to any of these family-run places, they’re the same.“

He thought for a moment, as a half dozen assistant bakers took a break in the back, and the line up front got even longer. “Of course, I don’t know of any of the other places that have such a big family that are all involved in the business,” Joe Faugno said, and then he rattled off a dozen names, the sisters and brothers-in-law and cousins, all of them now characters on television.

(Photographs by Jonathan Mandell, except Buddy’s casino cake, courtesy TLC Network)

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