Scenes From an Eye-Talian Restaurant
Scotti's has delivered southern Italian fare for Cincinnati for 112 years, and counting.
It’s the night before school starts here in the Swift household, and that called for something special. Like wax-covered checkered tablecloth special.
As we had a month-plus before moving here, I lived vicariously through the free books on Hoopla I could find in Virginia libraries, and through Google Maps. Scotti’s was near the top of the list. It reminded me of Rossino’s (RIP) where I briefly worked at SLU.
It’s my cursory reading that by the time the “eye-talians”1 got here to the Queen City, the only place to really settle was north of town in between here and Dayton. So with tomorrow’s Feast of the Assumption party up north in Cleveland’s Little Italy, it seemed only appropriate to go out for some Italian.
If you’d like to set the mood, play Comme facette mammeta? by Angelo Petisi and his orchestra, because that’s what was playing when we ordered. It’s apparently a comedic / romantic banger.
It is pretty awesome.
The twins were fascinated with the table candle and all its wax… until the bread arrived. Thankfully they didn’t fill up on it. We were the second people there, but it filled up pretty fast. The seating capacity is ~50 people.
Founded in 1912 by Mr. Salvatore Scoleri, it’s named after Antonio Scotti, an Italian baritone with the Met Opera. Scoleri’s first restaurant was “THE EUROPEAN RESTAURANT” in Philadelphia. Since many Italian restaurants are named after famous Italian celebrities, Scoleri asked Scotti if he could give him the honor, and named a new restaurant he started the following year after him in Cincinnati.
As it turns out, the pair knew each other before Scotti made it big. Phil Armstrong, a local photographer and artist, reports:
He was born in Gerace, southern Italy in 1882. When Scoleri was 15 years old, he became an officer’s cook in the Italian army and travelled frequently, honing his talent as a chef. In 1905, he immigrated to the US with a plan to set up shop in Philadelphia. On the boat over, he befriended a man named Antonio Scotti, a baritone singer with a plan to rise to stardom in America. … While Scotti was making it big in the metropolitan area, Scoleri “had to leave town for some reason” and moved to Cincinnati (specifically White Oak) where he opened a new restaurant in 1912 along the Miami-Erie Canal (present day Central Parkway). He called it “Scotti’s” to honor his friend who had finally made it big like he planned when they met on the boat.
Oh, and that Scoleri survived a shooting in 1918 by an Italian Army comrade named John Ciullo, who had a beef with Salvatore.
112 years later, here we are.
There is no formal kids menu, but the waitress, a descendent of Scoleri, helpfully informs that they can make anything kid-sized. The menu for adults is expansive. One twin had butter and pasta, the other spaghetti with meatball. A brief 1981 Cincinnati Post review called the waitresses “bossy.”
That was not our experience!
My main dish order was wrong. I didn’t say anything, because it was fine. Who am I to complain about getting veal when I ordered chicken? (It’s a more veal-centric, honest mistake.) The service was great, the portions hearty, and lighting appropriately dim for a candle-lit restaurant.
The minestrone starter soup was fantastic, and I don’t even really like it to begin with. I have ordered it precisely zero times, intentionally, in my life. The salad had pickled onions that popped with color: red and green, like they were intended to match the Italian flag. The house dressing was sweet, tasty, and generously applied.
Keith Pandolfi, The Enquirer’s food critic, in a recent review I read after I went there, says:
Lunch at Scotti's is a theatrical experience, and the fact that this 110-year-old red sauce joint is available to us in the middle of the day makes it magical. It might surprise you that Scotti’s is open for lunch. It surprised me the first time I pulled on the old red door and saw co-owner Marco DiMarco sitting at a table with a pile of paperwork before welcoming me inside.
A DiMarco welcomed us inside, too, and in addition to paying bills or some sort of paperwork, he also took a landline spam call from somebody purportedly from Google. It did not end well for the telemarketer. So we also got a little theatre. As a treat.
Near the conclusion, Pandolfi says: “And even if it’s not perfect, you’ll want to come back again.”
You know what? He’s right. I do, and we will.
Go There:
919 Vine Street
Cincinnati, OH 45202
https://www.scottisitalianrestaurant.com/ | Facebook
“We have been a standby for Italian classics since 1912, offering a warm ambiance and delicious food.”
Old Newspaper Reviews:
Sources and such:
iykyk, it’s how some people here talk.
I wish I could say I was the first to come up with this as blog post title, but I am not.
A feast for the eyes. I have to go there. Now on my bucket list along with seeing the Northern Lights/smelling Alessandra Ambrosio. (Platonically.)
It’s the unintentional minestrone that always hits the tastiest, like scanning to WEBN and coming across Stone Temple Pilots and thinking, “You know what? Not bad.”