Angelo’s Restaurant is a big and busy Italian-American restaurant — it has 60 staffers and a $1.2 million payroll — that looks at home between the mall and the newish office buildings along Interstate 70 in North Franklin Township on the edge of Washington, Pa.
Last August, it celebrated its 10th anniversary at that location. But more remarkably, next spring, it will celebrate being open for 80 years under the ownership of three generations of the same family. Popular dishes range from chicken marsala to veal piccata to shrimp scampi, and there’s a full bar, as well as a case of housemade gelato.
But it all started as the menu still does: With spaghetti and tomato sauce.
“Our original dish first served in 1939 by Angelo and Giacomina Passalacqua,” the description reads. “This is what started it, all and the sauce is still made the way Grandma made it. $10.00.”
No one knows how much a plate originally cost at the little shot-and-a-beer bar the immigrant couple started on West Chestnut Street — U.S. Route 40 — inside Washington’s city limits. But at some point, Mrs. Passalacqua started serving her spaghetti and people loved it, and before long the tavern became renowned in the region as the West Chestnut Spaghetti Inn.
There are complex reasons why this restaurant has survived for eight decades, nearly 16 times the average life expectancy. But one of the biggest ones is that red sauce. People still love it.
At the current version of Angelo’s, which offers several pages of menu items, the spaghetti still is the No. 1 seller. “It’s just the most basic, wonderful Italian comfort food there is,” says owner Michael Passalacqua. He’ll tell you that he once tried to phase out the red sauce to modernize the menu. That was one of the few mistakes he’s made with the restaurant, which he took over in 1992 when his parents, Silvio and Patricia Passalacqua, retired after 42 years. His father and his sister had taken it over from their mother, Giacomina, in 1958.
That’s the year the family remodeled the original building — swapping the smaller dining room and the bigger bar room — and added a full food menu. They’d renamed it “Angelo’s” after he died in 1953. Under that on the new neon sign was the word “Spaghetti.” And under that, “Parking” for the long boats that were automobiles of the day.
A matchbook from the period, with a pinup on it, notes that “Angelo’s Spaghetti House” served beer, liquor, wine/ steaks/ Italian spaghetti,” was air-conditioned and could be telephoned at BA. 2-7120. Lots of towns had spaghetti houses. Angelo’s later dropped that phrase, at least from its matchbooks, by the time its phone number became what it still is — 724-222-7120.
The original restaurant with period cars parked out front is one of the images in a big collection of family photographs that Michael Passalacqua, himself an amateur photographer, cherishes and displays in the restaurant.
Another one shows Angelo aboard the SS Conte Rosso, the Italian ocean liner on which he came to America from Sicily in 1917. Or so Mr. Passalacqua presumed, but while doing some genealogical research, he couldn’t find his grandfather’s name on the ship’s manifest. Turns out, Angelo wasn’t a passenger, but a passer — he shoveled coal on the ship to earn his passage.
He started in the Allegheny Mountains and moved to Pittsburgh’s North Side, where he had a market that went bust because of a gambling brother. Angelo met Giacomina there, and they had five children, whom she raised while Angelo ran his first bar in Washington, driving home in the wee hours of Sunday morning to spend the day with them. The family joined him after he bought the tavern on West Chestnut, which was a basic shot-and-a-beer joint, their son Silvio recalls. His parents started serving the spaghetti there, he figures, because, “That’s the only thing they had to offer.”
From the time he spent there as a young boy, his son Michael remembers, “The bar was full of blue shirts with names on them” — the workers in the local factories. Some would come into the dining room side with their families for spaghetti dinners.
Michael remembers “like it was yesterday” the day in 1958 customers helped his father swap the bar and the increasingly popular dining room. He laughs at how his family decorated the poles as palm trees. “What that had to do with an Italian restaurant ...”
An early 1970s remodel, with dark beams and paneling and a Naugahyde banquette, “This is my father’s greatest move,” he says, sharing photos of that. But as the ’70s became the ’80s, “Nothing changed. The room didn’t change. The menu didn’t change.” Angelo’s was a stereotype Italian restaurant, right down to the basket-based bottles of Chianti.
Michael was never meant to, nor did he want to, work in the restaurant. He went off to Kent State University and went into law enforcement and was happy enough with that until his father telephoned him one day and asked him to come home and run the restaurant with his sister Tonne.
He continued to try to do some of the updating his sister had started. As they moved from steam table food to made-to-order dishes, Michael says he “tried to downplay” the old-fashioned fare for more nouvelle dishes such as osso bucco to win new customers. “In my own naive way, I was trying to be a better restaurant escape than that spaghetti-and-meatballs, Chianti-bottle-in-a-basket kind of thing.”
But customers still wanted the red sauce, too. He got that: Like many Italian boys, he craved the “rigs and sauce” — rigatoni — and spaghetti and other pasta that the family would eat on Sundays at his grandmother’s house.
So as he continued to update and expand and eventually move the restaurant (and its most popular booth, Table 64), he also embraced the spaghetti, even using two noodles to form the “l” in the Angelo’s logo. He donates lots of spaghetti and meatball dinners for family and community fundraisers, for which, on Nov. 1, Angelo’s received the Washington County Community Foundation’s Charles E. Keller Excellence Award for Corporate Philanthropy. He’s looking forward to serving lots of spaghetti and meatballs at the open house for the restaurant’s 80th anniversary in March.
In his marketing, Michael — he’s 64 and his dad is 88 — talks about how they use top-quality ingredients for the sauce — including Saporito Filetto di Pomodoro canned tomatoes, flavored with pork rib ... and that’s about as specific as he gets. They make it in 25-gallon batches, three to four times a week. “It is never-ending.”
His cousin, Debbie DiStefano, who worked in the restaurant with her mom, Carmelina, says what has always made their sauce good is that it has a chunky texture, they don’t overcook it, and they put the hand-rolled meatballs in uncooked, which adds flavor and keeps the meatballs moist.
Talking to them about red sauce is like talking to most people about air. It’s just a fact of life. A necessity.
As Silvio puts it, “You can eat Italian food every day.”
Adds his niece, Debbie, “At least we can.”
Angelo’s Restaurant is at 2109 N. Franklin Drive, Washington, PA 15301. The website is https://angelosrestaurant.com.
Bob Batz Jr.: bbatz@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1930 and on Twitter @bobbatzjr.
First Published: November 5, 2018, 2:15 p.m.
