The Man Who Lives in His Restaurant
Home and hearth for the owner of a decades of Italian restaurant in Bensonhurst
Forty-six years ago, Tom Verdillo bought a building on 86th Street in Bensonhurst and opened a restaurant. He gave it his name, Tommaso. In time, he moved into an apartment upstairs.
Every morning he wakes by 4:30, goes downstairs and begins to cook. He works by himself, but he is not alone. On the wall hangs a painting of his mother. The restaurant, he says, is for her.
In a city where restaurants open and close over and over, Tommaso is an anomaly. It endures. Its customers are mostly Italian Americans, many of whom grew up in this once largely Italian neighborhood, moved away and now come back to eat at Tommaso. They come for eggplant parmigiana, the artichokes, and the focaccia, for the mussels. They also come for the opera, performed by a professional singer. But most of all, they come to see 71-year-old Tom Verdillo. “Tom is like my family,” says Frank LaVacca, a customer for 30 years who lives in Long Island now. “I come and eat without looking at the menu, just like eating at home. The sauce he makes is like what my mom made at home.”
Verdillo was a replacement child. His older brother died as a toddler of pneumonia. His mother suffered a mental breakdown. She was institutionalized, and Verdillo was placed in an orphanage. He was three years old. He does not recall how long he was separated from his mother — perhaps a year. When they were finally reunited, he says, he was so afraid of losing her again that he stopped going to school. “The separation caused me to cling to my mother,” he says, “so I became obsessed with being around her.” The best way to be with his mother, a nurse who loved cooking and entertaining, was to help her in the kitchen.
Verdillo got his first job when he was 13 at a nearby French catering service called Jacque. He spent four years studying cooking at the Food Trades Vocational High School on West 13th Street, which has since closed. At the age of 20, Verdillo took over Jacque and changed its name to Tom’s Catering. He cooked and delivered food to people’s homes, usually for parties. But he was lonely in the kitchen. “I wanted the people,” he says, “and the challenge of a restaurant.”
He was 25. His mother was sick and bedridden and his father, with whom he was never close, did not support his plan. Soon after, though, his father was killed in a car accident. With the $10,000 Verdillo received in insurance money he bought the building at the corner of 86th Street and Bay 8th Street. The building for which he paid $13,950, he says, is now worth more than a million dollars. Owning it means that even as rents rise, he has remained his own landlord.
Tommaso became Verdillo’s home. “I don’t have wife and children,” says Verdillo. “This is my whole life.” Thinking of his mother, he says, “The best time in my childhood was when she had those dinner parties for her friends on holidays and cooked. That’s actually what I copied here in the restaurant.”
It is hard to miss Tommaso, walking along 86th Street. Verdillo can be seen sitting at the bar, watching TV and drinking a glass of ice water. He always wears a red shirt. Behind him are piles of cookbooks and a cabinet displaying photographs of Verdillo with his nieces and friends. The main dining room has about 10 tables. It is decorated with Italian style paintings and ceramic plates. On the back wall is the painting of Verdillo’s mother. In it she’s smiling; she has her son’s round face.
Most of Tommaso’s customers no longer live in Bensonhurst. The neighborhood has changed since many of them were young — of Bensonhurst’s nearly 200,000 residents, 38 percent are Asian, according to the New York City Community Health Profiles of 2015. Chinese restaurants have gradually taken over 86th Street, the busiest street in Bensonhurst. But many of them close down or change ownership frequently. There are many sale or for rent signs on 86th Street.
One of the oldest Chinese restaurants on 86th Street is New Ruan’s restaurant, a family-run business opened in 1991. The owner, Jimmy Ruan, says that almost half of the restaurants opened on 86th Street in the past three years have shut down or changed ownership. In Ruan’s view, the short-lived restaurants only want fast money by providing low quality food with a high price. Ruan’s family does not own the building the restaurant is in, and is paying $10,000 a month in rent. He is struggling to stay in business. “As long as we can make it, we stay,” he says.
Verdillo is also feeling the pressure, even though he does not worry about rent. Labor costs are rising and he has fewer customers. He has had to lay people off and has to do more of the work himself. “At one time, I made a lot of money and had seven waiters,” he says. “Now I have to cut back.”
On a recent Saturday night, Verdillo stood next to the piano singing opera for his patrons. He sang two songs and then walked around the restaurant, chatting with his customers — among them a seven-year-old boy and an 88-year-old man. Though the restaurant stays open till midnight on Saturdays, as usual he left at nine and went back to his home upstairs.
