There’s a certain utilitarianism that generations past carried with them.
Pietro Eustachio still has that.
It’s the reason why, 20 years ago, he bought a four-plex and an adjacent parking lot, razed the structure and built a restaurant, Pietro’s, which he and his family live above to this day.
“I just picked it up, being in the kitchen,” he says of his culinary training and his reasons for staying in the restaurant business close to 40 years. “My cousins will come and eat when they come over from Italy and will give me some advice – but they like my food.”
He also knows enough to give customers what they like.
“Americans love red sauce,” he says in his thick Italian accent, shaking his head. “I don’t know how they eat so much red sauce, but they always ask for more.”
Eustachio is an alfredo man himself. But what he is more than anything is an Italian. As such, innuendos of family loom all over Pietro’s: articles with old family photos that his children had framed for him last year; his youngest daughter, Claudia, who helps out sometimes; his cousin from Turin, Italy, whom he brought over to be his chef; and his wife, Grace, who rises with Pietro to be in the kitchen by 8 a.m. and bakes fresh bread daily.
What the Eustachio family has produced is a place that feels like and is home, both to their diners and to themselves.
When Eustachio started the restaurant in 1960 at its first location, it was with a $40,000 loan from a friend. With no collateral to offer, the friend said: “OK, I’m gonna give it to you anyway cause I know you’ll pay me back.” The men shook hands and that was that.
“That would never happen today,” Eustachio says.
Years later, he borrowed $200,000 more from the same man to open his current location.
“It took me 20 years, but I paid him back,” he says. And his gracious friends wasn’t the only person who believed in the idea.
“My momma was in the kitchen, my daddy, my brothers. All the recipes come from my mother, God rest her soul. Everybody in different places now. Daddy and my brother in California. I still have a lot of friends and family in Italy.”
And at Pietro’s, so do we.
