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The last supper ... on Chestnut Street
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.
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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."
Positive News : 8/17/2008
Thank you!!
I loved this place... : 8/17/2008
I lived in Washington my entire life until I was 26. I have eaten here dozins of times an dlove every meal and the service. Anytime something was not quite right it was always respectfully corrected. when I do visit home I try to get there to eat again, I hope my next visit home (this fall) I will not forget the new place. I hope the ambiance can somehow be recreated. Thanks for the memories and the Best of Luck to your new endeavor.
This should never have happened - boo to city council : 8/17/2008
WOW I congratulate the Washington city council on their fabulous job of attracting businesses to Wash and keeping them here. Way to Go... let's see, how many business have left Wash in 5 years, 10 years to go to nearby towns to operate. Wonder why,maybe our enormous tax base (among other things, many many things). Sorry to see you go Angelos, a great restaurant. I think the city could have and should have down a lot more to keep businesses like yours here but no- it is more important to fight like you are the reigning monarchs in town and spend money we do not have while going bankrupt, and fight some more... oh and yeah create ridiculous overblown user fees enforced by a zoning officer, a job no one did apparently for years in Wash, since buildings sat rundown and without windows and roofs for YEARS and was there even zoning here then because you gotta wonder what the zoning officer did while being paid all those years the houses fell apart)? The point of this exercise is not only to say bye to Angelos and our regrets our stupid city leaders did not even try really to keep you here - and point out really, what has city council done for years except spend money they didn't have, raise taxes, fight, assign user fees that drive even more taxpaying citizens away (not attract them like we are Greenwich just because our grass is just cut OH so fashionably low, and the rich will just flock here right? and they'll gladly pay the highest taxes in the county in return for a lousy arguing town with lousy schools and lousy services, getting lousier and more expensive each day while council bumbles), and while council fights, fights, fights and does virtually nothing, they drive the town into a even bigger abyss. This is a disgrace and someone in this town should have done the right thing for businesses and tried at least to keep some of them here.But where are we? Same old thing and how IS that downtown renovation going ( I thought it never got finished, some phase or other, and our great savior Piatt , where is he now, making our town FAB, he is kind of absent these days, more money in PIttsburgh renovations?) - you know the renovation - a renaissance LMAO yeah okay - , new planters and sidewalks to attract tons of busninesses, and haven't they flockked here, while so many others opened in every town around us-except us? Coucil lost the tax base of Walmart, you lost JC Penney, which you are getting back out of sheer luck. The mall is a disgrace and a joke, Sorry I fail to see what my taxes go for here that does anything postive for anyone. And, you lost Angelos. Bye Angelos, you are great! I am afraid to see who is going to leave next. Maybe we all should. What would council do then? What would they fight over if no on is here? How high do the taxes go after everyone with any sense who has the ability to pay those taxes gives up and leaves for greener pastures - what then?
