A few weeks back, I made the old Carroll Gardens red sauce joint The Red Rose the subject of on my my "Who Goes There?" columns on Eater. While dining there, I learned of the 26-year-old restaurant's long roots in the neighborhood.
Turns outs, the Romano family, who own it, began their career in food services not on Smith Street but on Cheever Place, the one-block strip a few blocks further west. Father Tony ran a deli-pizzeria there. It serviced the nearby Sacred Hearts school (now a condo), feeding the Roman Catholic kids slices and meatball heros during lunch. When the school decided to serve meals in-house, the pizzeria declined and closed.
Tony's son described where the pizzeria used to be and what it looked like. I took that information and doped out that this storefront must be the place. 62 Cheever Place. It's a dwelling now and looks pretty spic and span.
The owners of chic salon on court st. told me about this place. they said that if a kid walked in without enough money for a slice of pizza they would sell them a potato sandwich for a nickel.
ReplyDeleteLOL - I remember that. As a matter of fact you could get "potato" on anything you wanted for a nickel.
ReplyDeleteI used to add it to my Hot Dog. But a lot of times we kids would save the pocket money that our parents gave us and we'd buy a potato sandwich instead of pizza.
We'd go back after school and spend our "leftover" lunch money on candy. (If Miss Anne would let us. If she thought we had TOO MUCH candy she's cut us off. LOL)
I often still see Miss Anne and "Uncle" Tony at the Red Rose - they greet everyone who enters.