The new pizzeria on the Country Club Plaza, Coal Vines Pizza & Wine Bar -- this week's Cafe review -- made me wonder how many Fat City readers can remember the first time they ever tasted pizza in a restaurant?
I can, because I remember -- and I was a child of the 1960s -- how different a hot, bubbling restaurant pizza tasted compared with the frozen discs or the Chef Boyardee "pizza mix" that my mother would bake at home. There wasn't such a thing as "gourmet" pizza in those days. In fact, many Midwestern Italian restaurants offered their pizza not as the main event but as something more like a side dish, something to eat with lasagna, garlic-broiled steaks or pan-fried chicken.
Local caterer Robert Salsman moved to Kansas City more than four decades ago and recalls the first pizza he ordered in town: "It was at Gaetano's, an Italian restaurant downtown on Eighth Street. The pizza was delicious."
I have a copy of Gaetano's menu from 1976. There were only seven ways to order a pie at that restaurant: plain, with cheese and tomato; with green pepper added; with homemade sausage added; with mushrooms added; with anchovies added; with pepperoni added; or with all of the above on one pizza. A large "everything" pizza cost $3.65. Today, that's the price of a large soft drink. (To put that price into perspective, though, Gaetano's offered a complete "Special Italian Dinner" with an antipasto salad, lasagna, braciola and a side of spaghetti for $4.95).
"In those days, you couldn't find a pizza in Kansas City that didn't have anchovies," says Leonard Mirabile, the co-owner of Jasper's Ristorante in south Kansas City. "Now you can hardly find a pizza in town that has one."
Leonard Mirabile says his father, the original Jasper Mirabile, served pizza when he opened his modest Italian restaurant at 75th Street and Wornall in 1954, but he realized that the Neapolitan pie wasn't so good for his business.
"Customers could get a small pizza in those days for 85 cents. If that's all they ordered, instead of eating a pizza with a steak or fried chicken or pasta -- we were losing money if we couldn't turn the tables. That's why my dad and Paul Silvio opened the first Antonio's Pizza at 43rd and Main Street in 1957. So people could go to a restaurant that only served pizza. You could eat in or carry it out. And a large pizza cost about a dollar."
Other pizza joints, many of them franchise operations like Shakey's or Pizza Hut, came later, as did locally owned, family-friendly pizza operations like the Pizza Shoppe and Fun House Pizza. Many youngsters in the metro got their first taste of cheesy pizza at these restaurants.
Leonard Mirabile and his brother, chef Jasper Mirabile Jr., still sell pizza from the casual dining venue, Marco Polo, at the front of the Jasper's restaurant space. But Leonard misses the old days, he says, when pizza tasted like pizza.
"There was a reason that the pizza of our youth tasted a little greasy," Leonard says. "The ingredients they used were real: real house-made sausage -- not a precooked product. And real cheese. Why would anyone want low-fat cheese on a pizza? It's not really cheese! And this deconstructed product they sell as pepperoni now!"
In the 1970s, an Italian restaurant named Il Pagliacci at 400 Wyandotte (it was torn down years ago) served a large "Around the World" pizza with anchovies, pepperoni, Italian sausage, hamburger, mushrooms, green peppers, black olives and Canadian bacon for $5.25.
If patrons wanted something like goat cheese, fresh basil, sun-dried tomatoes or house-made ricotta on their pie, they'd have to wait for the next century.
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Forgot- Jenny's for "nice" meals that included pizza, and other than that it was Italian Delight at Indian Springs....the Sicilian style pizza and calzones....great memories.
I love these trips down memory lane...... I too was raised on Shakey's as well as Zeppy's and Straw Hat Pizza. My first "real" pizza would have been at the old Jenny's restaurant...although I'm too young to remember all but the most basic elements of the "old" location around the corner, I do recall that sweet pizza sauce and thick slices of meat...we ate at the "new" building until it closed....and pizza was generally ordered as a supplement to what everyone already ordered for dinner.
Speaking of anchovies, I'll have to ask my mother if she remembers the name of the restaurant, but on the first date with my father they ordered a pizza "with everything" and weren't able to choke it down due to the anchovies. I don't know when it changed, but it sems like there was a specific point at which you no longer had to tell a restaurant to leave off the anchovies when ordering a pizza w/the works. Pineapple is probably the culprit here.....
Sounds like the KC version of "The Origin of the Species" much different from the Chicago one. In the early 50's my grandparents ordered a pie each their first time, not knowing they'd each be getting a 3 1/2 lb. deep dish concotion of heaven on earth!
Aah, Shakey's. Yep, that was likely my first pizza experience. We had birthdays there, other celebrations there, I rode those mechanical animals they had, and played their arcade games while the parents chit-chatted about real life issues and drank their beer and wine.
I miss that place!
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