Business editor
mbradwell@observer-reporter.com
Members of the Passalacqua family sat down to a final dinner Saturday at Angelo's Restaurant on West Chestnut Street, to reminisce about one of Washington's longest-running dining spots.
In a couple of weeks, current owner Michael Passalacqua will put the Angelo's name on a brand new restaurant in the Washington Square development in North Franklin Township and begin writing a new chapter in the 69-year-old establishment's history.
On Saturday, as the restaurant served its last customers, Michael, his twin sister, Michelle, their younger sister, Tonne, and their father, Silvio, described the evolution of the restaurant that Silvio's parents, Angelo and Giacomina Passalacqua, opened as a spaghetti house in March 1939.
Silvio, who started working for his parents at the restaurant at age 20 in 1950, acknowledged that while he has mixed emotions about the upcoming move, Angelo's always was changing "little by little" as it adjusted to changing tastes and times.
"When we started, all we had was spaghetti and meatballs and meatball sandwiches," he said, adding that when he and his now-late wife, Patricia, married, they lived in an apartment above the restaurant.
Over the years, the restaurant was visited by a variety of celebrities, including former middleweight boxing champion "Raging Bull" Jake LaMotta, cinema and television actor Donald Woods and Jon Kolb of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Michael and Silvio noted that the building underwent at least five major renovations, with the bar area changing places numerous times and the expansion of the restaurant into space that once operated as a candy store.
"We were always pounding nails and making dirt," Silvio recalled, noting that one time as a joke he placed a sign on a scaffold in front of the building that said the laborers would "work for food." He said the joke was up when two customers paying their bills asked for change "so they could give something to the guys working outside."
There also was a fundamental business change in the early 1980s when Silvio called Michael and Tonne and asked them to help him run the restaurant. Tonne also brought chef Mark Raynor from the old City Club in Pittsburgh to Angelo's to run the kitchen. Raynor later opened Cafe Allegro in Pittsburgh.
Working with their father, brother and sister began making culinary changes to the menu that for the first time offered food made to order, emphasizing quick preparations of fresh ingredients, something Michael said the restaurant still does today.
Tonne left in the late 1980s to attend Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and later worked in food service management in New York City. Silvio and Patricia retired in 1992, making Michael the sole proprietor.
The newest incarnation of Angelo's, which will occur in a couple of weeks, was in planning for the past couple of years, but was something Michael said he began thinking about in the late 1990s.
"We started talking about this in February of 2006," Michael said, noting that the parking lot across busy Chestnut Street was keeping older customers away and the tiny, hot kitchen was making it difficult to hire cooks.
The planning phase of the past two years made it easier for the family to accept the inevitable.
Michelle, who as a teenager worked at the restaurant making salads and later washing dishes, said the move to the new location marks an end and a beginning.
"It's bittersweet, obviously, but I think my brother has his arms around what he has to do. It's sad, but it's a happy time, too."