Restaurants that last decades: Cooking with Villa Rosa
Runtime: 3m 54s
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Restaurants come and go, but a few seem to last. Michael Cirillo, the owner and chef of Villa Rosa in Quincy, offered a lesson in creating the homemade Italian cuisine that has kept his restaurant open for three generations.
Video by Kaitlin Keane and Clara Long
Story by Clara Long
QUINCY -- For 20 years it was easy to find Mary McClellan of Scituate on Wednesday nights. She would settle into the same table at Jamie's Pub with a circle of her bowling teammates and closest friends. Joking greetings dispensed, then they would order chicken parmesan or shrimp scampi from the same waitress and pass the time exchanging pleasant gossip.
"I can't remember not coming here," said McClellan, a retiree who now spends her winters in Florida. "As soon as I come back up here the first thing I do is come to Jamie's."
That unwavering loyalty is what feeds the longevity of some long-lived South Shore restaurants that have been in business for decades, an eternity for businesses under pressure from
competition from national chains. To hear local restaurant owners tell it, there is no one secret to staying successful for so long, just a combination of tradition, taste and commitment to service.
Maria Massey, like her mother and grandmother before her, enters her family's restaurant, Villa Rosa in Quincy, keeping watch for a crooked napkin in a holder or a speck of dust that might be on the dark floral upholstery of the restaurant's booths.
Massey's grandmother, Marianna Marinelli, launched Villa Rosa 1952. She was a working woman in a time when such things were uncommon, Massey recounts.
"If men got unruly in the bar, she would reach for her broom," Massey, 52, said.
Now Villa Rosa's cook is Massey's brother, Michael Cirillo. His fond memories of Marianna, who died in 1994, combine with reverence for the recipes she handed down.
"We really strive to keep things the same," Massey said. "I think my grandmother would be proud of that."
The prospect of not making the original owner proud used to terrify Jim O'Brien, the owner of Jake's Seafood in Hull.
Jake's opened in 1949, a diminutive wooden A-frame on the isthmus serving up fresh seafood and lobster rolls.
Dottie Jakobsen, the restaurant's original owner, ran it alone; her husband died months after the opening.
With no children willing to take the restaurant, Jakobsen cultivated one of her summer waiters, Jim O'Brien, to run the place.
"The first few years the only thing I wanted to do was to make Dottie proud," O'Brien said.
But O'Brien, 45, has also expanded the place since he bought it with the help of his father in 1986. Under his ownership, Jake's has moved beyond lobster rolls to Cajun-fried tilapia, baked clams and arctic char.
"People come here for the tradition," he said. "But also because the food is excellent."
That's the way Arthur Kyranis has always seen it. Kyranis owns the 57-year-old restaurant Maria's in Braintree.
"You don't take shortcuts for the price," he said. At 70, Kyranis is in the restaurant every morning by 7 a.m., making soups and sauces.
"I do a fish soup almost every day," he said. "A lot of people tell me they know right away if someone else did it."
It's that attention to detail that Kyranis thinks has shielded Maria's from the competition that chain restaurants like the new Cheesecake Factory in Braintree might present.
"People are going to go there but then they will find out it's not the authentic original, and they'll come back here," he said.
Along with taste, John Pica Jr., the owner of The Venetian Restaurant in Weymouth, sees how social ties draw patrons back.
"People come in here and the waitresses have known them since they were kids," he said. "That's what keeps us going."
The Venetian, launched by Pica's uncle in the 1920s, is the oldest restaurant on the South Shore. Continued profitability and staff stability seem to go together.
"We owe most of our success to the employees who have worked here," Pica said.
Pica, 59, took over the restaurant from his father, who took it over from his uncle.
It seems fair to say that South Shore residents have faith that these venerable restaurants will prevail.
At Jamie's Pub, a waitress sets down steaming plates of food before McClellan and her friends.
"They'll always be Jamie's," said McClellan, picking up her fork. "It's an institution."
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