BY: Erica Marcus
“When you’re here, you’re family,” claims a well-known national chain. But Olive Garden has nothing on Long Island’s homegrown family-style Italian restaurants, where countless thousands of hungry diners share enormous platters of linguine and clams, veal Parmesan, clams oreganata, Caesar salad and other stars of the Italian-American repertoire. The first family-style Italian on Long Island was La Parma in Williston Park, which opened in 1984. Owners Tony Gralto and Dominick Gregorio were veterans of Don Peppe in Ozone Park, generally regarded as the first family-style restaurant in New York City.
“Don Peppe’s was a little hole in the wall,” Gralto said, “with a menu hanging on the wall. They served a lot of athletes and celebrities but no matter who the customer was, it was ‘You sit over there! You sit over there!’ I had a lot of customers who came from Long Island and I figured if I opened a place like that and was a little nicer, it would be a hit.” And it was. Gralto and Gregorio opened three more La Parma locations, and over the next three decades, family-style Italian restaurants multiplied all over Nassau and Suffolk.
SOURCE: http://www.newsday.com
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