Per Wikipedia,"the name roughly translates as 'Joe's Hole' from Italian"
April 17, 2019 10:31 AM   Subscribe

In Bon Appetit, Priya Krishna tells the story of the rise and near-fall of Buca di Beppo, discussing how a Midwesterner with no connection to Italian culture built a restaurant empire based on red sauce served under decor out of the wildest Italian-American sterotypes.
posted by Copronymus (70 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'd eat there! Sounds fab.
posted by thelonius at 10:39 AM on April 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


The original location sounds like heaven to me, and the retooled corporate version like hell.
posted by sallybrown at 10:42 AM on April 17, 2019 [5 favorites]


Huh! That explains a lot. I didn't know it had been influential as a chain. I went there once in Nashville with a big group of people. I enjoyed what I ate, and there was certainly plenty to eat. But I kept thinking vaguely: is this not offensive? Then I decided that if the Italians who had founded the chain had designed it like this, there was no call to be offended on their behalf; but I see here that they didn't, because they didn't exist. Anyway, the place certainly fit with the whole Opry Mills/Nashvegas aesthetic.
posted by Countess Elena at 10:46 AM on April 17, 2019 [2 favorites]




But I kept thinking vaguely: is this not offensive?

Yeah, I kinda feel the same way. Like, "let's have fun with ethnic stereotypes" doesn't really give me the warm and fuzzies.
posted by backseatpilot at 10:56 AM on April 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


Oh wow, this article brought back memories of girls’ night dinners in my early 20s at Buca in Minneapolis. I biked past the place literally two days ago and didn’t even notice it!

For a while around 2008 or so, I used to get coupons in the mail for mostly free meals there, so I used them for takeout. I wonder if the coupons were sent pre- or post-acquisition, either as an attempt to keep the doors open or a new marketing attempt by new owners.

That said, I learned quickly that if I had money to spend on Italian food it should be spent at Broders. Zero regrets.
posted by Maarika at 11:00 AM on April 17, 2019 [5 favorites]


All around the corners of this article is a complex conversation about immigration and cultural appropriation. It seems like there is so much more to be said.
posted by meese at 11:01 AM on April 17, 2019 [12 favorites]


I had no idea this was a chain, at least not outside of the Twin Cities. I looked at an apartment in the building (or next door?) when I was in Grad School here, in 2004. I didn't take the apt for a multitude of reasons, but one was that it smelled very strongly of red sauce and I was worried that I would either come to hate the smell (how sad!) or I would treat Buca like my personal kitchen and eat my weight in lasagna on a daily basis.

on preview: Broders is the One True Italian place in Mpls.
posted by Gray Duck at 11:02 AM on April 17, 2019 [7 favorites]


I grew up with a father who wished he was Italian-American, listened to a lot of rat pack music (I know every word to every Frank Sinatra song), and religiously took me and my brother to Buca di Beppo for dinner, even after the divorce. When I was young, I thought that Buca was the only one of its kind, and relished the loud, fun atmosphere. We ate mountains of spaghetti and ordered off-menu spumoni floats for dessert. Dad flirted with the blonde server and I would go to the bathroom just so I could inspect the pictures and the wallpaper for glimpses of nudity. It was one of the only places and times in my garbage fire childhood that was a perfectly preserved artifact of joy, untouched by the dark chaos of my parents’ relationship falling apart and the dysfunction in my extended family.

We stopped going after my dad remarried to a woman who preferred expensive steak dinners and moved too far south to make it worth the drive. When I found out it was a chain in my early 20s, it made a crack in my heart that broke clean through when I finally ate at one years later and recoiled at the sauce (this must have been late 2000s).

This article explained a lot. I regret that final visit and wish my memories of that place had stayed untouched.
posted by Snacks at 11:05 AM on April 17, 2019 [44 favorites]


In Canada, we have East Side Mario's which has the same kitsch feel, but has never been saved from its cost-cutting, declining quality era.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:13 AM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


Like, "let's have fun with ethnic stereotypes" doesn't really give me the warm and fuzzies.

I grew up in a partly Sicilian family and, frankly, some of them embraced the stereotypes - or at least embodied them.

I don't have a firm handle on it, but my impression is that, post the strong-armed "Americanization" of the c. 1900-WW2 period, and with the arrival of the first few generations of native-born descendants, there was a lot of cultural discontinuity, and also a major flattening of previously very important regional differences that led to the emergence of a watered-down, anodyne, mass idea of being Italian-American vs. being Italian. Also that this accelerated over time.

Anyhow, I think, by this point, it's likely hard to separate the commercialized Italian-American tropes shellacked all over a place like Buca di Beppo from Italian-Americanism itself. It's ridiculous, but I was at one for a conference dinner a few years back and found myself sitting at the bar looking the giant novelty Galliano bottles and thinking about Christmas at my great uncle's house.
posted by ryanshepard at 11:17 AM on April 17, 2019 [21 favorites]


I feel like this is one of those places that I've often heard about but never been to in person.
It's like Olive Garden but the pasta is worse and they don't give a big bowl of guily-pleasure salad.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:20 AM on April 17, 2019 [6 favorites]


In Canada, we have East Side Mario's which has the same kitsch feel, but has never been saved from its cost-cutting, declining quality era.

No joke, there was an East Side Mario's in Worcester MA, and it went out of business and was replaced by a local-ish Italian chain that I am having a hell of a time remembering, but then later became a Buca di Beppo.

I went to it once in its final form, for a rehearsal dinner for a wedding. All I remember is three or four of us drinking quite a bit and, in the most absurd Italian chef-from-central-casting voice, having a long conversation using only excited variations of the phrase, "Buca di Beppo!".
posted by tocts at 11:26 AM on April 17, 2019 [4 favorites]


It's like Olive Garden but the pasta is worse and they don't give a big bowl of guily-pleasure salad.

"When you're here, don't ever take sides with anyone against the family"
posted by thelonius at 11:26 AM on April 17, 2019 [9 favorites]


I'm related to Italians brought over as cheap labor for Oklahoma coal mines. One of them was injured in the all-too-frequent mine explosions (one killed nearly 100 miners and there were several more double digit death toll disasters after that) so he opened a restaurant.

The weird thing about Buca di Beppo was how eerily similar it was to that restaurant. The tablecloths, the pictures, the artwork. For me, it wasn't a stereotype as much as a reminder of how Italians tried to incorporate in America during the 20th century -- with these family-style restaurants in their own houses serving up steak and spaghetti. A stereotype look, absolutely, but at the same time it was so much how Italians framed themselves up for a white America that othered them until just a generation or two ago. They were family. They were history. They were bric-a-brac.

I'm not really sad to see Buca di Beppo go, though. It was a lot for what was just another casual dining chain.
posted by dw at 11:28 AM on April 17, 2019 [9 favorites]


I swear that I've never heard of this place, and am slightly amused by the description of it as being the quintessential low-brow red sauce joint, because I'd associate that with a place like Avanti's, a local Peoria chain that also has an outpost in Normal (coincidentally across from the now-demolished dorm where I spent three of my undergrad years). This looks more like an Italian-American-specific kitsch restaurant like a TGI Fridays' with specialized decor.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:35 AM on April 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


That was really interesting. I've only been to one once and I found it interesting in the same way I find Disneyland interesting. It's a blatant simulacrum, but it's nothing if not committed to its themeing. I think it was also before the food got bad. It wasn't a terrible meal.

I grew up around, went to Catholic school with and married in to a Pittsburgh Italian-American family. Italian-American identity often is as ryanshepard above notes. Buca is dialed up to 11 but I've been in many other homes, churches, restaurants and ethnic social clubs that are dialed up to at least a solid 8. Though I guess if Buca had really wanted to go for it, they'd have a cookie table.
posted by soren_lorensen at 11:43 AM on April 17, 2019 [4 favorites]


I live in an area with one of these and the unfortunate red sauce restaurant deficit the author and the founder talk about. I started the article with a curiosity about eating there that faded as I read on. It seems... uncool - “a restaurant you can look down on?” - and the idea that they actively resented attempts from an Italian American to make the place into a less offensive “homage” is telling.
posted by Selena777 at 11:47 AM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


Usually when people profit off someone else's culture insist that they're doing it out of respect. It's interesting that this founder admitted that he created his cartoon Italian restaurant so customers would be comfortable (disdaining it).
posted by grandiloquiet at 11:49 AM on April 17, 2019 [9 favorites]


Me and my friends still tell stories about a dinner we had there in one of the Chicago locations - like a dozen or so gay "bears" at a round table, at the center of which was a lazy susan with a bust of the Pope on it. (In fact the entire private room was nothing but Pope memorabilia.) It was great fun.

I never felt any disdaining or looking down on anything - just campy fun with a dash of nostalgia.
posted by dnash at 11:50 AM on April 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


My office is above a Buca, and their kitchen seems to vent into our bathroom. It's resulted in an unfortunate and unbreakable association between the smell of their sauce, and, well, piss.

On Thursdays they do something with olives that we're still not sure about.
posted by matrixclown at 11:50 AM on April 17, 2019 [30 favorites]


I did a mini-bio on Phil Roberts a while back and got to know him a bit. Real nice guy, and everything he touches seems to turn to gold. Glad to hear he got out of Buca at the right time.
posted by Sphinx at 12:08 PM on April 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


I just discovered that series via this article about one of the oldest restaurants in Augusta, Georgia. Like Buca, it was not started by Italians, but by a Greek family that thought they would have an easier time selling Italian food, although they have some Greek dishes on the menu. It really is a local institution, and the decor sounds similar to Buca's, but completely unironically. We also had a Buca Di Beppo here (appropriately located at the mall) but it seems to have closed. Sounds like we are better off with the original anyway.
posted by TedW at 12:09 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


Growing up in the NYC area a trip to the city wasn't complete without dinner at Mama Leone's, so I totally get this place and wish there were one in my area.
posted by tommasz at 12:11 PM on April 17, 2019


All around the corners of this article is a complex conversation about immigration and cultural appropriation. It seems like there is so much more to be said.

Yeah, if this place was called Dragon Palace and was started by a white guy from the midwest who wanted to recreate the Chinese restaurants of his youth with all the kitsch that entailed, he'd get dragged and hard.
posted by schoolgirl report at 12:15 PM on April 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


Yeah, if this place was called Dragon Palace and was started by a white guy from the midwest who wanted to recreate the Chinese restaurants of his youth with all the kitsch that entailed, he'd get dragged and hard.

I mean, that is 50% of P.F. Chang’s. So you’re not far off.

Also, the story of Benihana’s is interesting, as well. I took my oldest son and his friend there over the weekend. TBH, knowing the real history allowed me to have a nice discussion with my son and we viewed it as simply food theatre. And we chuckled at how I used to worry about “doing it right” and if I was having an authentic experience.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 12:35 PM on April 17, 2019 [10 favorites]


I think one saving grace is that he hired an actual Italian to be his head chef, and they worked hard to make the food authentic to the Northeast Italian-American cuisine, and to not skimp.

"Look down upon" is definitely a bad framing, but it seems like his aim wasn't to parody Italian Americans, but to make it a welcoming homage rather than a snooty, intimidating restaurant.

The CEO who took over may have been Italian(-American), but his approach seemed not only corporate-stingy, but also embarrassed. Just completely unwilling to embrace any of the cheesy bits of Italian-American culture, and felt like it needed to be classed up.

In Boston, we have family-style Italian, and we have haute cuisine Italian. There's a place for both. But trying to convert a chain known for family-style into haute cuisine is just a terrible idea.
posted by explosion at 12:37 PM on April 17, 2019 [6 favorites]


Never even heard of this place, because I live on Long Island and we still have plenty of what this article calls "red-sauce joints." I have to say that the sauce at least looks extremely appetizing in those photos. I've definitely seen worse...it's not like we don't have Olive Gardens and Carrabbas. I'll keep an eye out for this chain next time I'm traveling.
posted by Edgewise at 12:37 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


Am sitting in mild disbelief that Buca was created here in Minnesota.
posted by ZeusHumms at 12:38 PM on April 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


Buca opened in Minneapolis a bit before I moved to Minnesota for school. I grew up outside of Chicago in a part of the suburbs where you were absolutely spoiled for choice for good Italian restaurants - perhaps not the very fanciest regional cuisines but good, solid, modestly regional cooking, and somehow I had assumed that you could get good Italian food everywhere. I think I'd heard so many negative things about the suburbs that I assumed that if we had something nice, everything everywhere else must be even better.

Little did I know that I was moving to the land of No Italian Food Worth Mentioning, and Not Even Any Polish Food Either, and Mexican? Forget About It. (You can get an amazing variety of regional Mexican food here now, but that wasn't true in 1994.) If memory serves, someone I knew very slightly came back to school talking about how she'd been to this great Italian place, Buca, with her family, and she had a container of some leftover cheesecake, and when she opened it up it was just this big Olive Garden slab, and right then I knew something was sketchy about it. Of course, I was a terrible, frosty little snob about food, music and books all through school, too.

~~
As to Broder's in Minneapolis: I had a wonderful meal there once. But I won't be going back, ever, ever, ever. I went with two women friends, none of us thin or rich-looking or cis/straight/accompanied by cis men like the rest of the clientele, and they stuck us, all alone, in this awful back room with no service to speak of even though there were tons of tables in the front. It was very clear that they didn't want their real clients thinking that people like us ate there. I didn't have a very good time, and in future I'll just get Italian food when I visit family in Chicago.
posted by Frowner at 12:40 PM on April 17, 2019 [12 favorites]


It's a blatant simulacrum

I was waiting to see how long it would take someone to drop some Baudrillard into the discussion, because it seems so apropos.

I mean, there are restaurants in southern Italy, some of which presumably serve pasta and various types of sauce, some of which is red. This is the original, despite very few Americans—of Italian descent or not—ever having experienced it.

And then you have your first-order simulacra, which would be restaurants started by Italian-American immigrants trying to reproduce the food and settings they remembered from home, or maybe that their family had told them about. Insofar as it could be done here in the US (where the availability and cost of ingredients differ, people speak a different language, etc.), the intent was to faithfully reproduce something that existed elsewhere.

Then, later, there's the second-order simulacra, a product of industrialization and mass production, which replicates the first-order simulacra as a commodity. I'm tempted to say that Buca falls in here, as does Olive Garden and any number of other "Italian" restaurants, like the ones I grew up with in New England that were almost invariably run by Greek-derived families (who figured white people from Connecticut weren't ever gonna buy kolokythokeftedes or taramasalata, but zucchini fritters and antipasta? Sure why not, pass the ranch dressing). Because the originals and even the first-order simulacra don't scale as well as the second-order, many people only experience this version.

Perhaps the failure of Buca and the struggles of Olive Garden are a sign that we're moving towards the third-order simulacrum: people can sense the disauthenticity of the second-order simulacra, and want something else, something more "authentic" but for values of "authentic" that match their own internal expectations, not reality.

I'm tempted to say that something like the Italy Pavilion at EPCOT is a third-order simulacra, or maybe the newer Vegas places: they have enough budget to really chase the edge of what people expect and desire. People who have experienced Costa di Mare at the Wynn probably think they have a better grasp of "Italian food" than someone who's only eaten at the O.G. in Peoria (or Times Square), but it's still just as synthetic. They may fly the fish in from the other side of the planet every day, but you're still sitting in the Mojave Desert, experiencing something that's been filtered through focus groups and engineered to appeal to a particular type of customer. Delivering the feeling that you have experienced "Italian food" is the whole purpose, not actually serving Italian food as it is or has perhaps ever been served at any particular place in Italy.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:48 PM on April 17, 2019 [19 favorites]


> No joke, there was an East Side Mario's in Worcester MA, and it went out of business and was replaced by a local-ish Italian chain that I am having a hell of a time remembering, but then later became a Buca di Beppo.

Oh shit, Vinny T's! I haven't thought about that place in years.

drinking quite a bit and, in the most absurd Italian chef-from-central-casting voice, having a long conversation using only excited variations of the phrase, "Buca di Beppo!".

are we the same person?
posted by Old Kentucky Shark at 12:52 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


My favourite part of this story is when some italian dude tried to take the authentic American food, and tried to turn it into un-authentic italian food, by worsening the quality of the food to begin with?! Absolutely baffling and a really interesting example of how the facile pursuit of "authenticity" usually results in major inauthenticity.
posted by GoblinHoney at 12:53 PM on April 17, 2019 [5 favorites]


I once stayed at a hotel where this was the only restaurant within walking distance, so I ate there. It was not a good fit. As only one person, I could not eat the family-style portions, and the décor just horrified me because it was so calculated.

I've been lucky enough to eat at real red-sauce joints with real tacky décor, though. One near me genuinely DID serve that same red sauce on every menu item, so it was a lucky thing it was a great sauce and you could buy jars of it in the lobby. The house wine came in a small jelly glass and was pretty bad. You could stare at a plaster-of-Paris Venus de Milo while the 80-yr-old waiter put your jars in a bag to take home. I loved that place.
posted by acrasis at 12:53 PM on April 17, 2019 [5 favorites]


people can sense the disauthenticity of the second-order simulacra, and want something else, something more "authentic" but for values of "authentic" that match their own internal expectations, not reality.

I think this is absolutely what is happening with much of the high-craft, labor intensive post-c.2004ish artisan "hipster" cuisine (e.g. 3rd wave coffee). If not rooted in unreality, it's at least a product of multiple layers of mediation that are often hard to discern, and whatever the products, generally completely removed from the cultural superstructure that produced that supposed "authenticity".

It has also been fascinating to watch how rapidly it is being assimilated into what I guess may be yet another level of cultural abstraction, as possible fantasies of authenticity are scaled for use by chains (e.g. 7-11's single origin coffee) for signaling purposes.
posted by ryanshepard at 1:09 PM on April 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


On the other end of the scale, some thoughts on a fancy red sauce restaurant: A Home Is More Than a House. Sometimes It’s Also a Red Sauce Restaurant, from "bon appétit" by Roxane Gay.
posted by haemanu at 2:04 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


One of the longer-standing red-sauce joints in NYC, Trattoria Spaghetto in the West Village, just closed recently. I had marveled at its perseverance whenever I went by. But people still spend a lot of money to eat at Il Mulino, so...

Anyway, I find it misguided to identify one Single Pure Original Authentic and then treat all variations as layers of simulcra. Any cuisine brought to America is going to change to respond to the broader culture and the logistical differences. That makes it its own thing, not a simulcrum. That doesn't mean there aren't such things as deliberately engineered recreations, which can be more or less offputting, but the notion that a cuisine is only that True Cuisine at one time and place and everything else is a falling away or fake doesn't reflect how living cuisines actually operate.
posted by praemunire at 2:14 PM on April 17, 2019 [4 favorites]


Interesting. I always enjoyed the Buca di Beppo in Old Town Pasadena CA but I do guess it was mostly in the '96-'98 era, maybe before the food got bad? If you had 3 or 4 people and got lucky you might get to sit at the booth *inside* the kitchen and they'd bring you little bites of almost everything that got made. We'd only order a couple of things and you never went home without enough leftovers for the next day and a half. I had no clue it was a chain of any sort. There was always a long line and I think it's the first place I knew of that gave you a little pager like thing so you could put your name on the list and then go walk around until you got the beep. It's sorta sad to find out about the reality or how things turned out...
posted by zengargoyle at 3:15 PM on April 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


I always thought that buca di Beppo sounded like some sort of sex act involving a Marx brother.
posted by buzzv at 4:07 PM on April 17, 2019 [5 favorites]


Despite having been to many Italian restaurants I feel like I've never really had real or good or real good Italian food and I think that's a shame. I would love to try it some day. Even when I went to Italy with a school trip they mostly fed us dry turkey and other bad American style food and the restaurants seemed to serve the same watery spaghetti with red sauce as back home. I love the word red sauce instead of tomato sauce because "red sauce" captures the lack of any flavor whatsoever. The only thing we can say about this stuff is that it's red and it's sauce.
posted by bleep at 4:19 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


Yeah, if this place was called Dragon Palace and was started by a white guy from the midwest who wanted to recreate the Chinese restaurants of his youth with all the kitsch that entailed, he'd get dragged and hard.

Previously:

Why Does Andrew Zimmern Get to Create the Next P.F. Chang’s?

Lucky Cricket, Andrew Zimmern’s first full-service restaurant project since becoming a television personality, opened yesterday in a mall in the Minneapolis suburbs, serving an expansive Chinese menu that touches on Sichuan, Xi’an, and Hong Kong cuisine. As Zimmern told Fast Company in a long video interview that ran today, he worried that the community “wouldn’t get” the kind of personal takes on Chinese cuisine seen at big-city restaurants like Mister Jiu’s and Mission Chinese, both helmed by chefs of Asian-American descent, but he wants them to: “So what I have to do is I have to introduce them to hot chile oil, and introduce them to a hand-cut noodle, and introduce them to a real roast duck.”
posted by memento maury at 4:51 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


There was one in Austin when we lived there in the late 90s/ early 2000s, but we never went because it sounded like you might get seated at a table with strangers and I would rather starve.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:52 PM on April 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


St Louis has The Hill and their kitschy longtime red sauce restaurants (Favazza's, Charlie Gitto's, Rigazzi's, Cunetto, Zia's) are the big draw for old people. These places haven't changed in decades and they're pretty much where everyone brings their boomer parents.

Without the folks, we go to Anthonino's or Milo's.
posted by fluttering hellfire at 4:52 PM on April 17, 2019


PS If your parents are afraid of the city, then you go to the South County Rich and Charlie's.
posted by fluttering hellfire at 4:54 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


The original Buca was (still is??) at 12th and Harmon in downtown Minneapolis. When it opened, the spot was kind of at the edge of the upscale condo district on one side and formerly seedy areas on the other, today it's very thoroughly gentrified.

Back then....it was genuinely kind of fun. It's in the basement of an old stone apartment building. The food was super unpretentious, but that also gave you license not to care.

The article makes a big deal about Minneapolis not having red sauce restaurants back in the day. Not true, there were lots of places. Mama D, Vescio's, Dulono's, not to mention the original Totino's, home base for Rose Totino whose frozen pizza became a national brand.
posted by gimonca at 5:01 PM on April 17, 2019 [6 favorites]


Minneapolis likes to think the dining world ends at the Mississippi river.

St. Paul was home to a much more diverse ethnic base back in the day. Both the east side and the west side had numerous Italian red sauce restaurants. To this day, Yarusso Bros. on Payne Avenue and Little Venetian on Rice Street serve up that classic family run Italian restaurant vibe.

Cossetta's on West 7th has great food and a good little deli and grocery.

All three of these restaurants date back at least one or two generations. Not trendy, just good.

Frowner, try crossing the river once in a while.
posted by mygoditsbob at 5:17 PM on April 17, 2019


I ate at the original in 1994 or ‘95 and it was really good. The food was quite edible. Ten years later we went to a corporate place and it SUUUUUUUUUCKED. Since hearing it doesn’t suck as much, maybe I’ll give it a try again. The over-the-top making-fun business: meh, whatever. I see it more as “making fun of long-ago restaurants” than “omigosh, genocide of Italian culture.”
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 5:26 PM on April 17, 2019


Frowner, try crossing the river once in a while.

In my defense, I don't have a car and I live in the middle of Minneapolis - I don't know St. Paul at all well because getting there takes a long time on the bus. (I don't go over there much without a specific destination in mind because it's such a long trip that it gets to be a real drag if you don't end up doing something pretty fun.) I have no bias against St. Paul - in my student days, when I was coming in from outside the city, I went to St Paul a lot because I could just get off the bus there instead of Minneapolis. I had my first ever tofu at Hunan Gardens in downtown. But I never saw any Italian restaurants!

In any case, rest assured that St Paul will be getting some of my Italian-restaurant dollars immediately.
posted by Frowner at 5:40 PM on April 17, 2019


Metafilter: on Thursdays they do something with olives that we're still not sure about.
posted by taquito sunrise at 6:04 PM on April 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


Metafilter: on Thursdays they do something with olives that we're still not sure about.

Metafilter is the old school, tchotchke-cluttered red sauce joint of the internet, really.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:08 PM on April 17, 2019 [7 favorites]


Blue sauce joint, surely.

Goshdarnit, now I want spaghetti.
posted by darkstar at 6:36 PM on April 17, 2019


The whole bon appetit red sauce package is rather delightful. I'm thinking that American-Italian food is a thing in itself, and authentic in itself. It's nothing like Italian-Italian food, and as a European I'm not sure I can ever enjoy it, but I don't see it as offensive or appropriative. Italians have very strong opinions about their national heritage, but for those I know, they just disregard American-Italian food entirely, rather than arguing about the details.
posted by mumimor at 6:46 PM on April 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


Thanks to those above who mentioned all the red-sauce places that did (and still do) exist in the Twin Cities. There was no shortage of Italian American food here. Buca also coincided with the opening of “real” Italian places in the Cities like Giorgio’s and others. AND 1993 was the year of The Splendid Table written by our very own Lynn Rossetto Casper which introduced the country to northern Italian cooking and basalmic vinegar. So while the Twin Cities of 1993 can’t compare to today, there was actually a lot going on culinary if you knew where to look.
posted by misterpatrick at 7:00 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


Oh shit, Vinny T's! I haven't thought about that place in years.

Oh man, I don't know why I couldn't remember the name.

Fun fact: Vinny T's was originally Vinny Testa's, which, uh, the jokes kinda write themselves. But, it was actually really good in its original incarnation. Really solid red sauce Italian with giant plates for sharing family style. Also excellent whole roast heads of garlic that you'd pull the cloves out of and smear on bread. Also for some reason they'd always do a table number lottery thing where they pulled a number out of a wine bottle and if it was your table, your meal was free.

Things went downhill after it became Vinny T's, and oddly enough (just found this via google): the name change was at the behest of their new corporate owners when the small chain sold in 2001. Who did they sell to? Buca, Inc., owners of Buca di Beppo.
posted by tocts at 7:09 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


As to Broder's in Minneapolis: I had a wonderful meal there once. But I won't be going back, ever, ever, ever. I went with two women friends, none of us thin or rich-looking or cis/straight/accompanied by cis men like the rest of the clientele, and they stuck us, all alone, in this awful back room with no service to speak of even though there were tons of tables in the front.

...are you sure it was Broder’s? I’ve been there dozens of times, and I don’t think they even have a back room, and the place fills up the minute they open. Plus the clientele is all over the map and definitely not majority thin/rich/cis.
posted by Autumnheart at 7:53 PM on April 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


"On Thursdays they do something with olives that we're still not sure about."

All time comment, there. Shades of this Far Side cartoon that was also an all-timer among my family, growing up.

I could care less about Boca di Basement or whatever I just read about, but I recognize its place within the zeitgeist of the US cultural assimilations, re-appropriations, & capitalism. Agree with meese that there's a complex conversation here.

Growing up in a small town with a sizable Italian-American community, I was most intrigued by the fact Bon Appetit has a whole series on "red-sauce" restaurants. Forget the parodies, the original Italian-American eateries are my favorite genre of restaurant, far and away. I'll eagerly hunt them out in a new city when the family's on a road trip. (Sounds like an AskMe thread... what's your favorite red-sauce joint in X city????)
posted by Theophrastus Johnson at 8:40 PM on April 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


Ah Buca di Bepo, the site of one of my favorite anecdotes. It was late 2000 or early 2001 and was visiting a friend in San Francisco for a long weekend to help him with his struggling startup. We took Saturday night off to eat and my friend took me to the Buca di Bepo that was in town and had just opened up. The place was jam packed and we waited a long, long time and we consumed a lot of wine while we waited.

We were finally seated...at the booth that is in the kitchen. This wasn't like sitting at the chef's window as is the fashion in contemporary restaurant design but rather this was a place to eat in the kitchen 3 feet from the pass and 8 feet from the burners. The restaurant staff would also parade other customers through this space and random people would also wonder by.

It was one of these random people that is the focus of the story. He had an Italian + New York accent. Looked to be in his 40s or 50s and was wearing a relatively nice suit. I took him to be the manager of the joint. Considering that I was pretty loaded on Chianti, I thought I would be funny to tell the nearby waitress to get the gentleman any drink he wanted on my tab. Much to my surprise, he orders a drink and sits down.

He then begins asking us questions about the restaurant business and which of the staff is the best. Hinting that he could use some of them in New York. It is slowly dawning on us that he thinks we are the managers or the owners of the restaurant. Strangely enough he tells us that he is visiting SF because he has a sideline in selling off the physical assets of failed dotcom startups. Considering my friend's startup wasn't doing that well, that felt very awkward and ominous.

He eventually got us to admit we weren't in the restaurant business but rather than tell him the truth we decided to tell what we thought was an innocuous lie: we were indie filmmakers. This made him even more excited. In his words, his life story was full of cinematic movements. He hinted at shady underworld events. He wanted the movie to be called, "The Pawn". All throughout this part of the evening he is trying to convince us to go out to his car because there are unspoken things that would impress us. We really didn't want to go as you can imagine and eventually he decided he would go get something and bring it back to us.

He leaves and the restaurant staff comes and circles around and tells us that they are concerned for us but wasn't sure what to do. Needless to say we were freaked out. About 10 minutes later, a different Italian guy appears in the kitchen and approaches the table. This is literally what he said in total: "We mean you no disrespect. The next time we are at your restaurant, we will wait like regular people, we will eat like regular people and we will leave like regular people. We mean you no disrespect."

And with that he turned and left. We didn't see any trace of them when we left.
posted by mmascolino at 9:19 PM on April 17, 2019 [21 favorites]


Enjoyable article. Thanks for sharing.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 9:53 PM on April 17, 2019


...are you sure it was Broder’s? I’ve been there dozens of times, and I don’t think they even have a back room, and the place fills up the minute they open. Plus the clientele is all over the map and definitely not majority thin/rich/cis.

I was absolutely sure it was Broder's Pasta Bar, but could it conceivably have been Terzo? They're both right there at 50th. Neither the menu nor google street view really clarifies matters and my memory of the actual literal door has faded since. Either way, the only solution will be to establish which one actually has a back room and avoid that one.

I guess, based on the "there are red sauce restaurants in the Twin Cities" bit, I can only say that when you don't have a car and you move to a city as an adult, your knowledge of place can be really patchy. It's difficult to know all the little commercial corners once you get south of about 40th, just because the city starts to spread out - the blocks get a little longer, the major streets diverge and the major crosstown streets (consider 38th, for instance) get progressively less bike-friendly.

Also, I think that when I moved here I wasn't really looking for red sauce places - where I grew up, there were just a lot of...I don't know, downmarket Broder's? Places that would have a mixture of regional and Americanized Italian, emphasis on vegetables and fresh sauces - sort of the Italian equivalent of the Los Ocampo mini-restaurant at Midtown in that you'd never say it was fancy or expensive, and it wasn't farm-to-table regional cuisine, but it definitely skewed regional/"authentic". And while I'm obviously an unreliable narrator, I feel sort of confident that there at least weren't nearly as many of those here as where I grew up.

When I moved to Minnesota, there were tons of things I'd never had before, partly because my parents didn't like them and partly because the Chicago suburbs were at least at the time pretty fragmented - after I moved away, my parents moved from an area where there was tons of Italian food and some Polish food to an area with a lot of Japanese and Indian restaurants but not a lot of Italian ones. And the Chinese restaurants I grew up with were 1960s-vintage Cantonese. So I'd literally never had Indian food or tofu before I moved here, and I'd never been to a food co-op - the Wedge blew my mind, and that was before the first expansion.

It was far more that I undervalued the things I'd grown up with - assuming that I'd always have access to good, relatively cheap Italian restaurants, Polish bakeries, etc - and was therefore surprised that the Twin Cities, where I had my first tofu, avocados, palak paneer, larb salad, dim sum, etc, etc, didn't seem to have Polish bakeries readily available. It was like moving from somewhere where you could only get, eg, rye bread to somewhere with a hundred kinds of bread but no rye.
posted by Frowner at 1:03 AM on April 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


“The way they displayed wealth was in the food they served,” he explained. “They kept the Christmas lights on all year-round. They hung up velvet paintings of Mount Vesuvius.” But he noticed that as the owners were aging, and Italian-Americans became more assimilated into mainstream American culture, these red sauce spots were closing—and there were certainly none like them in Minneapolis."

As a native East Sider of St. Paul, this annoys the hell out of me. Buca may have been a novelty in Minneapolis, but only to residents too insular to cross the river. St. Paul has a long history of family-owned and run Italian restaurants, especially on the East Side. A lot of them aren't around anymore, but a lot of them still are. Off the top of my head:

Cossettas
Yarussos
Mama's Pizza
Buon Giorno
Little Oven
Donatelli's
Giuseppe's
Dari-ette Drive-In (yes, seriously)
Little Venetian

Buca opened in Minneapolis a bit before I moved to Minnesota for school. Little did I know that I was moving to the land of No Italian Food Worth Mentioning.

The Twin Cities is by no means an Italian Restaurant Wasteland; you simply have to cross the river to get to them. The East Side/Swede Hollow area near the old Hamm's Brewery is still practically ground zero for Italian families and there are still several Italian restaurants and grocery stores/delis in that area. Mama's Pizza on the North End (Rice Street) - and they do pasta, too, and if you celebrate the stereotypically tacky neighborhood Italian dive decor, they've got that, too. The Dari-ette and the Little Oven in the east suburbs of St. Paul. Donatelli's in White Bear Lake. The Little Venetian in Vadnais Heights, Guiseppe's in New Brighton. And everyone knows where Cossettas is. The problem isn't finding a real Italian family restaurant to eat at, it's deciding which one to choose.

For that matter, we've got Italian families who are still in the market gardening business after generations - the Frattalones and Costas, to name two. See their stands at the St. Paul Farmer's Markets.
posted by Lunaloon at 5:12 AM on April 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


The whole bon appetit red sauce package is rather delightful. I'm thinking that American-Italian food is a thing in itself, and authentic in itself. It's nothing like Italian-Italian food, and as a European I'm not sure I can ever enjoy it, but I don't see it as offensive or appropriative. Italians have very strong opinions about their national heritage, but for those I know, they just disregard American-Italian food entirely, rather than arguing about the details.

That's the way for a lot of our authentic American cuisines and the Italians approach to it is exactly right. They are literally two different cuisines, it might be interesting to explore similar roots and inspirations, but Italian-American food is just American food. Pizza and the stuff Italians call pizza need never be compared, if anyone is ever found decrying one and praising the other, as if a binary choice needed to be made to make a statement about themselves -- they are mouth goobers and you can be a little skeptical of any of their food opinions or assertions.

The most interesting thing about red sauce is that tomatoes have not been part of Italian cuisine for very long -- Tomatoes are American! Red sauce existed long before Europeans ever got around to slaughtering and stealing from any of the Americas. "Authentic" Italian sauce is fundamentally derived from some weird twist on well established cuisine from another culture.
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:06 AM on April 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


As a kid growing up in Minneapolis, crossing the river to St. Paul was like going to the Moon. My best friend grew up in St. Paul and it was the same for her with going to Minneapolis. We lived virtually identical existences (same grade in school, same hobbies, same sports, same interests) but didn't meet until we were adults. There was zero overlap. Her family stayed in St. Paul and mine stayed in Minneapolis, and that's not a particularly unusual thing. I wonder how much non-work travel there really is between cities? That'd be an interesting study.

So yeah, we Twin Citians miss out on stuff by staying on our side of the river...but for the most part, if I'm looking for an Italian Restaurant, I'll first look in my neighborhood before looking to a whole nother city (AKA The Moon). I'll go further afield if there's something that one city has and the other doesn't (only one has the Science Museum, and only one has Target Field for Twins games). I think it's a weird mental block that some Twin Citians have - that the other city is SO FAR AWAY - even though you can literally walk with one foot in Minneapolis and the other in St. Paul in some places (the river doesn't perfectly bisect the Twin Cities).
posted by Gray Duck at 8:10 AM on April 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


My feeling is that people don't go from Minneapolis to St. Paul or vice versa at least in part because the commercial/arts/education/entertainment clusters are not back to back at the river. It's not like you wander down the fun row of shops on Ford Parkway and then amble across the river to go to Cecil's Deli (which is actually an easy bike ride for me, making it a place in St. Paul that I go sort of regularly) or like you can pick up some fancy Vietnamese groceries along University and then stroll over to Dinkytown. If you start out in one commercial area of one city, you're a long way from the commercial areas of another.

This is even true within Minneapolis - I'm far, far more likely to go somewhere if it's in the square formed by 40th and Lyndale on the horizontal and 35 and the river on the vertical. Getting over to Kramarczuk's in Northeast is a special trip, for instance.

I think that when people come in from the suburbs, whether near or far, they're almost in a better position, since they're pretty likely to be driving and they can choose their approach - it's less of a hassle to come in by highway than to go from, say, Chicago and Lake in Minneapolis to the Macalester area in St. Paul.

If anything, this thread is making me realize that there's a lot of sort of excessive finger-shaking about how people don't journey between cities too much.

It's absolutely true that Minneapolitans don't pay attention to what's going on in St. Paul, and someone who is willing to go from, say, 50th and Lyndale over to Masu in Northeast but not to Sakura in St. Paul is being pretty unfair.

But I think there are a lot of boring average Minneapolitans and St. Paulites who just don't have the time/ability to travel between cities for fun regularly, and that's because these are in fact two cities, with relatively widely spaced commercial and arts centers - maybe it's not like saying "hey, you're in New York, that's in the Northeast, why don't you pop over to Boston for the day, it shouldn't be a big deal" or something, but it's a lot bigger a trek than just saying "I live in Edina, I'm going over to Richfield.

That said, I'll definitely get over to St. Paul soon to try some of these Italian places.
posted by Frowner at 8:38 AM on April 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


I resemble these comments. I grew up in Mac/Groveland in St Paul and spent my childhood running around the skyways of downtown St Paul, terrorizing Grand Ave and Highland and generally being an obnoxious early 80’s unchained latchkey kid. I don’t think I actually saw downtown Minneapolis until my teens.
posted by misterpatrick at 9:58 AM on April 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


But I think there are a lot of boring average Minneapolitans and St. Paulites who just don't have the time/ability to travel between cities for fun regularly, and that's because these are in fact two cities, with relatively widely spaced commercial and arts centers - maybe it's not like saying "hey, you're in New York, that's in the Northeast, why don't you pop over to Boston for the day, it shouldn't be a big deal" or something, but it's a lot bigger a trek than just saying "I live in Edina, I'm going over to Richfield.

The closest analogue might be San Francisco or San Jose and Oakland.

When I was in Chicago, it blew my mind to learn that some people mostly stayed on the North or South side.
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:27 AM on April 18, 2019


Carmine's is another chain with an almost identical story: Founded in 1990 by a corporate team to recreate the disappearing Italian-American restaurants, now a successful chain. Based on my couple of visits to each, there's only one significant difference: Carmine's actually has good food.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 11:15 AM on April 18, 2019


When I was in Chicago, it blew my mind to learn that some people mostly stayed on the North or South side.

Part of the issue there is transit links. When I lived on the South Side I didn't have a car, so just getting to the Loop was a significant effort, and getting to anything north of that was probably going to take at least an hour each way and at least one bus-bus or bus-train transfer, which are a drag at best and actively terrible if you're in the 9 months of the year where it's below freezing or over 90 out. If there was a quick and easy way to get from the North to the South and vice versa, you'd see fewer people sticking just to their side of the city, but Chicago didn't become one of the US's most segregated cities because the people with the power to make something like that happen are totally cool seeing poor black people in their neighborhoods.
posted by Copronymus at 11:50 AM on April 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


When I lived in Chicago during my adolescence, my friends had two main hangouts--our neighborhood and downtown--and rarely went elsewhere in the city. (I've since wondered if that was in part a safety thing, as young street gangs were around and defended their turf.) Similarly, when I lived and worked in Brooklyn, some of my co-workers rarely went into Manhattan, even though it was easier to get to and from Manhattan than many other places in Brooklyn itself.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:18 PM on April 18, 2019 [1 favorite]


Wish I’d commented earlier! I knew Buca’s was a MN chain, and I now go past the empty shell of Buca in Milwaukee almost every day. I went to that Buca a few times, the latest was in 2002 for my mom’s 60th birthday party, and then I had a MEMORABLE visit to Buca in Chicago, in November 2004, for my ex’s birthday. It was the day after the Kerry/Bush vote and we were both depressed, and the restaurant was empty and the staff seemed to be depressed. It was really kinda awful. We tipped well. The thing I remember about Buca was GARLIC. Like, every dish was infused with it, and walking past it, I would smell garlic.
posted by quarterinmyshoe at 7:17 PM on April 23, 2019


GoblinHoney: "The most interesting thing about red sauce is that tomatoes have not been part of Italian cuisine for very long"

Tomatoes starting being used in Italian cooking around 1700. To me, over 300 years feels like a reasonably long period of time.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:46 PM on April 23, 2019


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