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About Us
In 1918, my Grandpa Petti arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, settled in the
Collinwood neighborhood, and opened Petti’s Grocery. As the story goes, he
opened it just to feed his eight children. He would travel downtown on the
streetcar to buy fruits and vegetables to sell in his grocery store. My
mother, Dora, was born in 1914 as the second oldest of eight. She both attended school and worked in the
grocery store. When she was 16 years old, her parents went on vacation to
Italy, and she was left to take care of the business. She was forced to quit school and began to
run the family business. My mom was a workaholic.
Living above the store made it easy for her to work all day. Running the
store during the day – prepping, cutting, working with the purveyors, serving
the customers... she even managed being the butcher. She would throw a hind quarter over her
shoulder, bring it out of the cooler, toss it on the block and cut it up – by
hand... there were no band-saws back then. She cut round steak very thinly;
cut the pork chops with the cleaver and was ahead of her time for a woman
running a business. At the end of the
day, she prepped for the next day and filled the shelves at night. Then along came the milkman who worked for
his uncle’s dairy, Manfredi Dairy. My mother fell in love with that milkman, my father Angelo, and they
married in 1936. She remained working for her father until WWII began. The Black Hand “Mafia” tried to shake down
Grandpa Petti. He told them he would
close the store before he gave them a penny and that’s what he did. By the time Ma and Pa had their three
wonderful sons….Carl in ’39, me in ‘40 and Fritz in ’43……she was itching to
go back in the grocery business. So in
1944 Mom and Pa bought the grocery store from Grandpa Petti, we moved in
upstairs and renamed the store Quagliata’s Foods of Quality. That’s where my brothers and I learned how
to stock shelves, sort soda pop bottles, deliver groceries and butcher
meat. I can remember being 14 years
old and every Thursday I would cut pork butts and make sausage. I had to
stand on a Coke box to reach the meat grinder to stuff the sausage. We owned the store with the attached house
until 1957, when we bought another bigger grocery store on the corner of 93rd
and Yale – which is where I “earned” my college education. Anytime anyone asked me where I went to
college, I answered “Yale”. Mom and Pa and their three boys ran the grocery
store called Angelo’s Savmor, along with several other employees. It was part
of a group of other small local store owners, who banded together to buy
product more economically to allow us compete against the bigger chain stores
– a consortium of its day. In the
mid-60’s, we knew it was time to move on and sold that store to the
landlord. Next to come was the big
move to Mentor, Ohio, where we rented a recently-closed restaurant called the
White House, from my mother’s uncle, Fred Lariccia. We added Quagliata’s and hence - Quagliata’s White House was created – our
first foray into the restaurant business.
In 1970, we added one of the finest gourmet dining rooms between New
York and Chicago named The Tre Scalini Room.
It was the place to see and be seen in the city... tuxedo-clad
captains, waiters, tableside cooking, including some of my specialties:
Caesar salad, spinach salad, scampi, rack of lamb, stuffed Maine lobsters
(live from the tank), fettuccine alfredo, chateaubriand, crepes suzette, spun
sugar and café diablo. Every table
captain was flambéing something, sterno flames all over the room. It was a
quite the sight. In 1975, we opened The Spaghetti Company in Mayfield and
later another Spaghetti Company in North Olmsted along with the opening of
Ristorante Giovanni’s in Beachwood. By then, much of the higher-end clientele
was frequenting Giovanni’s so in 1979, we transformed Quagliata’s White House
into Italian Gardens Smorgasbord, of which the name speaks for itself. Continuing with our growth, in 1983, we
opened a Spaghetti Company in Solon and in 1988, and Café Angelo in Mayfield
Hts. In 2006, I heard about a certain pizza place in Las Vegas called
Settebella. So I checked it out and
liked what I saw, which got my wheels spinning. As I started looking for
pizza ovens, I found Stefano Ferrara Forni from Naples, Italy. While attending the National Restaurant
Show in Chicago, I happened to have dinner at a pizzeria named Spacca
Napoli. I met the nicest man named
Jonathan Goldsmith, who could speak beautiful Italian which made me sort of
jealous. My friends and I ordered
everything on the menu, along with a few bottles of wine. Jonathan joined us and shared with us about
what he learned in Italy. I fell in
love with his place and he willingly shared with me the details of his
operation. That experience prompted
me to make many trips to Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, Las Vegas and
Pittsburgh checking out every wood-burning pizzeria that was part of the Vera
Pizza Napaletana Association.
Eventually, I bought the land and building occupied by a former coffee
shop, and renovated it to become what is now, Crostatas. Renovations started in November of 2007. In
February 2008, Ferrara Forni sent all the bricks and mortar from Naples and
arrived with his assistant Raffaele. Three days and $35,000 later, we had a
beautiful pizza oven. We finished the renovations in about 10 months and were
in business. So now the fun starts!
What are we going to serve?
With all the years in the food business, I wanted only the best of everything
- my mother’s famous words were “if you want it done right, do it
yourself”. So I did - and still
do. Even though I have hired a great
team, I am still the key architect behind what we do and how we do it. I made the dough every day in my private
dough room with the controlled temperature the way Jonathan showed me. I made cavatellis and raviolis and even
had my mother making arancini until she was 92 years old. I told her that her walker was interfering
with business and she finally agreed it was time to retire.. She said if she
was 10 years younger she would have loved to work here. Mom passed in 2011
just shy of her 97th birthday. I
still cut all the Daisyfield pork butts for the sausage, meatballs and
arancini balls and I cut the strip steaks and porterhouse steaks. Sixty years later, I am still filling the
casings with sausage. I seam the pork legs from the organic hogs from New
Creation Farms in Chardon, Ohio to create our pork cutlets. Our 8oz double lobe chicken breast come in
fresh from North Carolina. Our sea
bass, cod and tuna come from Euclid Fish of which I still skin and portion
out. Crooked River Coffee Company
around the corner roasts our coffee beans.
Keeping family tradition from the 40’s and 50’s, we make our own bread
crumbs from ciabatta bread from Orlando’s Bakery that Sonny and Johnny
Orlando and their families operate (their father, Chester, baptized me). Our fresh mozzarella is produced by my
cousins at Miceli’s Dairy. I worked
at Miceli’s selling cheese in my younger days. We purchase our Italian imported products
from our good friends at Sidari Foods.
Sidari brings in all our imported oils, cheeses (Bufala milk
mozzarella) and pastas. In 2004, I
brought in burrata cheese from California’s Gioia Cheese Company – a time
when not many in Cleveland had ever heard of it. I go to the market at Northern Ohio Food
Terminal twice a week for our produce – buying only the best and
freshest. That Caesar salad dressing I
made tableside in the Tre Scalini Room, I now make by the gallons along with
our Balsamic vinaigrette dressing.
Our stuffed artichokes with breading and olive oil along with our
marinara sauce is made the way my Sicilian grandmother taught my mother, with
a lot of love. Having the greatest crew working for me, I have showed them
how to make almost everything - from the dough, lemon curd, raspberry sauce,
cannoli filling, spumoni, ravioli, cavatelli, meatballs, roasted red peppers
and tomatoes, stuffed peppers, grilled eggplant, to our soups and sauces. Well, that tells my story, and the reason
you see me here all the time... I live it and love it. |
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© Crostatas 2010 |
