That’s Amore
Katie Anderson/Observer-Reporter
Maria Barron, of Washington, makes manicotti from scratch in her restaurant, Ala Maria’s on Lemoyne Avenue in Washington.
Katie Anderson/Observer-Reporter
Ala Maria’s Italian restaurant on Lemoyne Avenue in Washington reopened last year.
Katie Anderson/Observer-Reporter
Maria Barron, of Washington, makes manicotti the way her mother taught her in her restaurant, Ala Maria’s, on Lemoyne Avenue in Washington.
When Maria Barron, of Washington, was 12 years old, her mother broke her wrist, leaving much of the Italian household cooking up to Maria.
“She took my hand in her hand and said, ‘Oh, you have the same size now,'” Maria said. “There was no measuring, so you counted scoops of flour with your hand. Whatever she did, I would mimic.”
Now, Maria has her own Italian restaurant, Ala Maria’s on Lemoyne Avenue in Washington, where she makes the homemade recipes her mother brought from Italy.
Both of Maria’s parents grew up in Italy, in towns 5 kilometers apart. But they didn’t meet or fall in love until they were both living in Washington. Maria’s mother, Maria Teresa Giuliani, moved here from Roccadaspide, Italy in 1964. She came here on a tourist visa to avoid an arranged marriage, Maria said.
Anthony Musto, Maria’s father, was already living in Washington as a U.S. citizen, though he was born and raised in Castel San Lorenzo, Italy.
“Oh, it’s not a very big world,” Maria said about her parents.
Musto saw in a church bulletin at Immaculate Conception that she was here on a visa, so he went out of his way to meet her. Within six months, in July 1965, they were married, and a year later, Maria was born.
They lived on Springfield Avenue, and her father was a mechanic for a car dealership. The business held a company picnic each year.
“Mom would always make a great big bowl of pasta, spaghetti,” Maria said. “Everybody would drool over it.”
Her father’s coworkers used to tell her mother, “Maria, your food’s great. You should open a restaurant,” Maria remembered.
She worked as a prep cook at The First Stop restaurant on Chestnut Street in Washington for four years.
“Everything she made, they would sell out of,” Maria said.
Maria Musto started the restaurant, Paesano’s, on Maiden Street, in 1984, but it closed after a year.
That year, Maria graduated from Washington High School, after which she joined the U.S. Navy, serving from 1986 to 1988. She was stationed in Agnano, Italy, and her aunt lived only 20 minutes away.
“My mother never sent me care packages,” Maria said. “She said, ‘If you need anything go see my sister.’ I’d leave to go out to dinner, and the guys at the gate asked where I was going. I said, ‘I don’t eat at the chow hall.'”
Back in Washington, Maria’s mother reopened Paesano’s in a different location in 1989, on Stewart Avenue behind West Tire. She had it for 10 years, during which Maria helped in the kitchen.
“I can remember all the fun times in the kitchen with my mom,” she said. “When we made meatballs, she’d be like, ‘Look at the meatballs – You made one small, one big, one cockeyed.'”
After Maria had two daughters, Andrea and Gabriella Barron, she started working as a carrier for the post office in July 2000, to provide for her family. Now she works behind the counter at the post office at the corner of West Chestnut and Jefferson Avenue.
It’s her full-time job, but she wanted to have a “simpler life” when she eventually retires from the post office. She decided to open a restaurant.
Maria bought the property, 405 Lemoyne Avenue off Maiden Street, in 2007 to start her restaurant. Previously, the building had been a grocery store, furniture store and a children’s playroom. The renovations she had to do were lengthy and expensive.
“I was really overwhelmed with what had to be done,” Maria said. “It was a mess. It took me four years just to gut everything out.”
She named it Ala Maria’s, which mean “Maria’s way,” because when she worked for her mother for 10 years, she didn’t get to run the kitchen her way.
“It’s my kitchen; I say how I want it done,” she said.
It was open for just under a year when Maria’s mother died in 2011. Maria had to shut down the restaurant to go to Italy. After that she fought a serious illness for two years, and wasn’t able to reopen the restaurant until March 2019.
“People come in here and say, ‘I know you: You look familiar,'” Maria said. “Sometimes I’ll say, ‘Well, I’ve sold you a book of stamps before.'”
Maria makes manicotti, gnocchi, lasagna and raviolis from scratch, the way her mother taught her.
“When you make this kind of food, it does not come out of a box,” she said. “This is time consuming. Traditional, Italian cooking is homemade, not something you just whip up.”
Maria spends long days and nights and weekends in the kitchen cooking for the 5 to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday hours they’re open.
“A lot of times when I’m here late, for some reason it will pop into my head a conversation that I had with my mother in the kitchen,” Maria said. “After I got into my mother’s face and swore, ‘I’ll never be like you,’ she laughed and said, ‘You’re going to be exactly like me.’ Now, I am my mother.”
The restaurant is a way to preserve her Italian heritage, to remember her mother and to provide her with a “simpler life,” Maria said. She’s now passing on her cooking skills to her 8-year-old granddaughter, Da’shya Maria Jackson, who often visits the kitchen to learn and help her grandmother.
“A lot of kids these days walk around lost because they don’t know where they came from,” Maria said. “You have to know where you came from.”