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The remarkable, the extraordinary history of the Como

By Frank Parlato

First generation. Francesco Antonacci, founder of the Como in 1927.
The Como 1935
The Como 1952
Second Generation: Dominic Colucci, Mario and Nick Antonacci
The Como 1980
The Como today can seat 1,100 people
Left to right- Some of the third generation: Lou Antonacci; Dominic Colucci; Anthony Antonacci, long time waitress, Barbara Salerno, Master Chef Steve
Hall and Frank Antonacci. Not pictured from the third generation: Frank Colucci and Mario Antonacci
Member of the third and fourth generation: Dom Jr and Dom III. Dom III said he hopes to help develop the Como sauce, now marketed in local stores and on the internet. He envisions a substantial
Canadian market for his great randfather’s famous tomato sauce.

Niagara Falls has always been known for good Italian Food, but in large part, all the rest are merely an adjunct to the Como Restaurant.

Without the Como, Niagara Falls perhaps would not be famous for Italian food.

The Como opened its doors in 1927. It was founded by Francesco Antonacci, born in Italy in 1889.

After coming to America, Antonacci found work in the Pennsylvania coal mines. Today he could have received welfare and food stamps.

Instead he went to work. Down in the mines before dawn and up after dark. He never saw daylight except on a rare day off.

In 1923 Antonacci saved enough to come to Niagara Falls – the young and growing city of 50,000 (the same population as it has today) and home of a world wonder. He opened a little bakery on 20th Street, making pizza and saving. Always saving.

By 1927, he had enough to buy a house with a storefront on Pine Avenue for his own Italian restaurant. It had only six tables. He called it the Como.

It was easier in those days to start a business. We were Americans then, with grit and guts. We didn’t dangle from the government teat of entitlement. Courage and determination combined to open the Como’s doors.

In time “Frank” built his business, on, one has to deduce, the food. It was good. And maybe a little on the homemade wine. The menu was small. It centered on the sauce Frank had created. And hard work.

At night, after a 16-hour-day, he would go upstairs above the restaurant where he lived with his wife and children. There he rested for a few hours, before he would rise and begin again.

In time, the Como expanded to make room for Frank’s customers and the growing demand.

He purchased and demolished a neighboring house to expand his restaurant. Then he bought another, and the Como’s expansion continued.

Frank’s two sons and a daughter were reared to the business. Adeline waitressed from the time she was 12. She would go to school and come back and waitress.

After more than 30 years at the Como, Francesco died in 1963.
Of his children, Adeline remains in the business. Nick and Mario were in the business until they died, Nick in 1986, and Mario, until the night of his death five years ago on New Years’ Eve, when he was struck and killed by a car in front of the restaurant where he spent his life.

There is birth and death at the Como.

At 89, Adeline still works three nights a week at their newer restaurant at the airport. For many, the Como has been their life’s work.

When Adeline married Dominic Colucci, they lived together with her father, Frank, above the Como. Dominic was a bricklayer and at night he would come home and bartend until there was enough business for him to quit his day job and bartend full time.

Dominic’s son, Dominic Jr., is a man brought up in the business. When the Como would have functions he would wash dishes. This was not the era of the spoiled television child.

Dom Jr. would go down the old staircase and peek through the round porthole. He had to look first to make sure he didn’t bang anybody when he opened the door. Then he’d wash dishes.

A violation of every child labor law today, the underprivileged youth was made to wash dishes when he was 6 years old in his family’s business.
“There were no automatic dishwashers then,” the 62 year old Colucci remembers. “Everything was done by hand, so downstairs they would be bringing racks of glasses with plungers, me and my brother Frank did that. So we started very young.”

As for Dom Jr., this early bout with hard work must not have hurt him badly. He never worked anywhere else. He went away to college in Long Island, graduated in business management, then came back. Dominic manages the Como today, 56 years after he washed his first dish there.

His brother Frank was also not harmed by such work ethic. Today, he manages the Como’s airport restaurant.

And cousins Lou, Frank and Mario Antonacci, Uncle Mario’s son also stayed. You can find Frank in the dining room and Mario most nights at the bar, greeting customers and making them feel at home. And cousin Lou, he runs the Deli next door.

It is almost anachronistic in the modern world-- this joint family where brothers and sisters and their children all work together in their grandfather’s house.

Nick’s children are no longer in the business, but his son-in-law Steve Hall is head chef, a skill he learned from Nick. Steve went to college; but he too started washing dishes at the Como when he was a kid. Nick was head chef then and took a liking to young Steve; took him under his wing, started training him from scratch how to cook and, one day, wound up giving his daughter away in marriage to Steve.

“We are all close,” Dom Jr. said. “We were close growing up. That is how Italian families were back then. The Como was our family home; we had our Christmas parties here. We were closed, but we all came here, our families came here for Christmas. On Christmas day it was more than 25 people and it was just family.

Of course the expanding family helped the businesses to expand. Today there is more than the Como; there is the airport Como; the Como Sauce sold in supermarkets, and the internet and the marvelous Deli.
It’s hard to say how many times the restaurant has been remodeled and changed. The family built two banquet halls. It seems like yesterday for some, but it was, in fact 1958 and in 1959 they built the bar. In 1978, they expanded the Deli, expanded the kitchen and built the Francesco banquet hall on the other side of the Deli.

The dining area, the banquet rooms and the bar can seat 1,100 people.
On a full house they might have 24 waitresses, 17 cooks, 8 cashiers, 7 bartenders: almost 60 people.

While it has grown, some things have not changed. The recipe for the sauce is the same as when Frank served his first bowl of spaghetti in 1927. The raviolis, the manicottis, the gnocchi, the fettuccini, the lasagnas, are still made in their kitchen. They bake all their own breads: pizza bread, Italian breads, rolls, the cookies and the bowties.

You can get bread at any restaurant, and maybe no one goes to a restaurant just for the bread, but at the Como they still bake their own as they have for decades. Maybe it is a touch of class and preserving of the old ways.

And through the long interval of 85-years, as the city rose and fell, the family, too, has had good times and bad, but somehow it hasn’t impacted them. Perhaps because of longevity and word of mouth and the family.

It’s like walking into an Italian family’s home instead of a restaurant. The food is great, the place is clean, prices are reasonable and the service friendly.

Of course they have their Canadian base. About 45 percent of customers in the dining room are Canadians.

“I get lots of people from Canada who tell me, ‘My mother brought me here when I was a kid,’” said Dom Jr., “and they might be 60 now.”

It struck me as intriguing that there is a fourth generation working at the Como. Lou Antonacci’s daughter Dawn works there, as does Dominic’s daughter Cara and his son, Dominic III. In fact, Dominic III plans to make his career in the business. He started when he was 14, and, after going to college, decided to come back.

“It’s my calling,” he said. “I enjoy it immensely. I enjoy talking to customers, getting to know people.”

His father explained, jokingly, “I ran his head into the wall three times. ‘Are you sure you want the restaurant business?’”
His son interrupted, “I love the business. The people, I love the most. I listened to my grandmother talk about working 14 hour days, then taking care of my grandfather, then taking care of these guys. How could I go any other way, after all that hard work? It keeps me motivated and I have to keep it going.”

Do you envision your own children continuing in the business?

Dominic III said, “Sure, I would hope that if I am lucky enough and I have a son he would want to come in and take over. I wouldn’t put pressure on him. It would be his decision.”

Over the years, the Como may have served five million meals. People keep coming in. Twenty, thirty thousand different faces a year and they keep laying down food.

“What I tell somebody when I hire them is ‘these are not our customers, they’re our friends,’” Dom Jr. explains. “When they come into that front door, it’s like coming into our living room. That’s the feeling I want you to have. I try to remember their names, what you eat. The waitresses remember what you eat. We have a lot of regulars. It’s more like a family friendship.”
“We get joy out of people saying how good everything was, how friendly everybody was, we’re gonna come back,” said Dominic III.

His father agreed, “We get a joy out of people enjoying our restaurant. I don’t care if a waitress serves from the right or the left. I’m not big on that sort of thing. I’m big on friendliness, I’m big on when customers leave, ‘were they satisfied?’ And I’m big on the service. We have had staff here for over 50 years. I have cooks that have been here over 50 years. I’ve got bakers that have been here over 45 years.”

Besides the restaurant, the deli, the airport restaurant, they do a lot of banquets. Around 600 a year. Weddings, baby showers, First Communions, graduations, wedding anniversaries, bereavements. Many have come full circle here. And with that comes a responsibility, a trust, to make sure that people get a golden memory of their life’s important occasions shared at the Como. Laden in the very walls of the place are a million golden memories and countless people, some here still, and so many gone who once shared life among us. And that too has a power.

“What’s really good here is when you get the 50th Wedding Anniversary here and they got married here,” said Dom Jr. And, really, how few are privileged to say such things.

They have customers who have been coming in since before any one of the present family was born. Celebrities come there. Whenever anyone asks what the most famous restaurant of Niagara Falls is, everyone points first at the Como. And there is power in that.

We asked Dominic III of the future. He replied, “As far as the future, we want to take it as it comes. As the opportunities open up, whether it is to expand or opening new restaurants, or selling our sauce more, or taking this place itself to a new level.”
Of the past, distilled over time into a sentence or a word, Dominic III said, “To sum this place up in one word is it’s ‘family,’ that’s it.”

Dave Urso, a familiar face over the last six years at the Como, agreed. “When you come in, you’re treated like family.”
Then he pointed to something else unique. “In all restaurants I have ever worked, we’re the only place-- and it always amazes me, that this place is so organized-- that you can assume: ‘Well, we’ve got 37 people. Can you handle us in a half an hour?’ And we never turn anybody down. They will get the hot food at the drop of a dime…. I have worked at the Country Club in Buffalo, The Red Coach, and everywhere. This is the only place that won’t turn you down. They can turn out at the drop of a dime

Mario Jr. worked here all his life.

“Back in the day, dining out used to be an art,” he said. “You came and that was an evening out. Now everything – everywhere else - is rush, rush; just sell it. Everything is ‘cryopacked’ Pre-portioned, sealed. At the Como our food is authentic.”

So what is the biggest change you have seen at the Como over the years?

“There is no change,” Mario said. “We just keep pumping away at this place.”
Is it true that you serve the same sauce now as you did in 1927?

“The same sauce,” he said. “And I know that for a fact.”

 

 

Niagara Falls Reporter www.niagarafallsreporter.com

Nov 13 , 2012