St. Louis has lost perhaps its most celebrated, revered restaurateur.
Vince Bommarito, Sr., died early this morning at age 88.
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Bommarito was inarguably one of this city’s great restaurateurs and likely its best known. He was the founder and owner of Tony’s, which for decades has been St. Louis’ most celebrated and acclaimed restaurant. Under his stewardship, Tony’s won the Holiday Award in 1955, the most prestigious restaurant award at the time. After that came the coveted Mobil Five Star awards, AAA Five Diamond awards, and the Best Italian Restaurant Award from Condé Nast.
The man was a learned advisor and a mentor to many, myself included. (I often referred to him as “dean of the old school.”) When I interviewed him in 2012, he’d been in the business for more than 60 years. I had talked to and interviewed hundreds of chefs and restaurateurs over the years but had only been intimidated by one of them: Vince Bommarito, Sr. I was surprised that the wizened octogenarian, a restaurant guy who knew it all and had seen it all (and didn’t suffer fools wisely) put me immediately at ease.
As I described our conversation back then, “In an office surrounded by awards that other St. Louis restaurants covet but none can claim, Vince Bommarito Sr. sits at a desk thumbing through the week’s receipts, each day’s sales numbers succinctly detailed onto long strips of paper, a rather Joe Friday approach to the myriad statistical analyses of what has, in recent years, become a much less profitable industry. But ask the patriarch of local Italian restaurants a question about food, local restaurants, or even downtown St. Louis, and be prepared for an extended answer, a response that only a sagacious 81-year-old restaurateur can provide.”
As I nervously asked my first question, he thought for a moment and then launched into a tangential response that had nothing to do with the question I’d asked. I could be in for a long afternoon, I thought. Ol’ Vince has lost it. But it was all a setup, a backstory framework that he brilliantly wove back into the question at hand. I asked another question, and he did it again. Short questions led to circuitous answers—and some of the best restaurant stories I’d ever heard.
There was the day when when Vince called A-B’s bluff (prompting a visit from beer baron Gussie Busch himself), the day Bommarito’s seafood broker in Boston introduced him as “the most particular son of a bitch in North America,” the night he got into a fistfight in the restaurant’s vestibule (guess who won?), and a classic story about how the way he remembered all of his guests’ names and needs.
And so it went for several hours, with me riding the edge of my chair like a restaurant groupie.
I remember flying out of that chair when the fire alarm went off—or so I thought. On his desk was a boxy black desk phone, the kind with a wheel on the bottom to adjust the bell-style ringer, which he’d turned up all the way.
We talked about how he got his start. His father, who owned Tony’s Spaghetti House, died when he was 17 years old, when Vince was a senior at St. Louis University High School. “My mother reminded me that I was the oldest son, handed me the keys, and then told me to go run the restaurant,” he recalled. “I had worked there but one summer as a busboy. That’s how this whole thing started.” He ran the restaurant with his brother Anthony (Tony) Bommarito, who later opened Anthony’s (which became another legendary downtown restaurant), and after that, A. Bommarito Wines.
The original Tony’s was located just off Produce Row and was initially open for breakfast and lunch, mainly to accommodate the nearby workers, then eventually opened for dinner. Bommarito said he’d buy cab drivers spaghetti dinners and an occasional drink and ask them to park in front, “so it looked like I had a fancy place.” Eventually, Tony’s Spaghetti House became Tony’s Spaghetti and Steak House, which morphed into Tony’s, which he ran with his sons and daughter almost until the day he died.
Beginning in the 1950s, Tony’s put St. Louis on the restaurant map. No one had ever seen an owner (or maître d’) escort guests up a flight of stairs backwards. (Vince believed that a host should never turn his back on a guest.) And few had experienced the seamless level of service for which the restaurant became famous, a three-tiered brigade system where staffers appeared and disappeared magically, never asking the same question twice. (When we named Tony’s the Restaurant of the Year five years ago, writer Dave Lowry noted, “Waiters here move like Olympic swimmers navigating currents: smoothly, effortlessly. Rushing? Déclassé.) In 2018, Tony’s was named a James Beard semifinalist for Outstanding Service, a national category.
SLM’s Ann Pollack remembers the way Vince could skillfully read a table, and more importantly, teach his staff to do so. His hands were always in motion when he stopped by, she recalls, moving a bread plate half an inch this way or making sure the forks were precisely parallel.
There was the rigid, militaristic way that tickets got ordered over a microphone: No one was allowed to speak except the person ordering. It was no surprise that Tony’s was the most immaculate, most toured restaurant kitchen in St. Louis. It seemed that everyone who visited Tony’s brought home a story.
During our memorable interview, afternoon became late afternoon, and the daily meeting was called around 4:45 p.m. Afterward, per the daily ritual, the shutters were closed, the lights dimmed, and the entire service staff said, “It’s showtime!”
People frequently ask what my favorite restaurant memory is after working for decades in the business. It was what happened the next day, when Vince Sr., the all powerful Oz of the Restaurant World, surprised me with a call.
“You know,” he said in that scratchy voice. “I don’t think I answered all your questions yesterday. You wanna talk some more?”
