Every Picture Tells a Story: Famous Luigi’s Restaurant — Washington, DC (1986)

EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY:
FAMOUS LUIGI’S RESTAURANT — WASHINGTON, DC (1986)

I moved to Washington, DC right after graduating from college. Initially, finding the right job was tough. So, I paid the bills by taking other jobs.

I bartended. I waited on tables. I even worked as an inserter at The Washington Post on the graveyard shift (that job lasted two weeks — here’s what an “inserter” does on a newspaper). I finally landed a “real” job on Capitol Hill, but at various times I held second jobs and did part-time work due to the high cost of living in Washington.  Besides, I have expensive eating and drinking habits.

Working at Famous Luigi’s on 19th Street, just off of Dupont Circle was heaven and hell. The restaurant first opened in 1943. The story goes that Luigi Calvi, an Italian immigrant, baked the very first pizza served in Washington, DC. When you think of Famous Luigi’s, imagine candles and red-checkered tablecloths. Nightly specials. Very old world. So, this place was an locals institution.

Back then, I lived in a Victorian brownstone near Dupont Circle (1628 Riggs Place, NW). This was right off of 16th Street, a neighborhood less than a mile from the White House packed with restaurants and bars, which is now pretty much the gay section of Washington. It was a shared apartment building (actually a house). I had the top floor all to myself. Trouble was, kitchen privileges were spartan, at best, so I had to eat most of my meals away from home. This made life expensive, especially since I don’t do fast food and want the good stuff.

There was a “Help Wanted” sign at Famous Luigi’s which was hiring. They needed a night bartender. Wow, talk about the perfect job! I also ended up waiting tables there, because the money serving food was better. (Note: Later, I worked across the street in the alley bar called Mister Days, a sports bar.)

Well, I learned more about food and life and people in that restaurant than any professional job I’ve ever had. Famous Luigi’s was run by a husband-wife team. The maitre’d/host was a statuesque blonde who ran the dining room. Think of the actress Cathy Moriarty in Raging Bull.  The chef was an Italian, born in Naples. They seemed to both work 80 hours a week. I mean, they were ALWAYS there. The restaurant also had a connection to Filomena Ristorante in Georgetown, which I think is still around and was known as perhaps the best Italian spot in the entire District. I never did understand the relationship between the two restaurants, but Filomena used to purge lots of stuff from Famous Luigi’s, so the place where I worked always seemed like and was treated as a stepchild.

Let me tell you a secret about inner city restaurants in converted brownstones, the kind you often see in big cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. On the outside, they look so cozy and romantic. But in reality, they are absolute HELL to work in. First, there’s no space for anything. Not for storage, anyway. Or cooking. Deliveries are always a mess. In the late 1800’s when these homes were built, closets were small. Rooms were tiny. Kitchens had no amenities. So, creating a modern full-scale restaurant out of something not designed as a business is well, problematic. Then, there were two dining floors at Famous Luigi’s. That meant waiters had to run up and down a staircase all night long to get food and drinks. That was brutal after 30-40 trips. We also had what’s called a “dumbwaiter” elevator in the back, but the damn thing was slow and you had to pull a chain to bring up the food. If you were serving upstairs, by the time the plates came out, the food was often lukewarm. That meant customer complaints. Frustration. Lower tips. Am I getting too specific here? Maybe. But that’s how tight these places are. You’re constantly bumping into people. It was an exhausting work environment (which is why I lasted only 6 months there).

The chef used to hand roll all the pasta, which made Famous Luigi’s the real deal when it came to authenticity. No boxed dry pasta at this place. Every dish was world class from the old country. And remember, this was a downgrade from Folimena, which took anything that was good at Luigi’s. Even though I didn’t work there for long, I still got to spend many nights in the basement with the chef from Naples (I forgot his name, but I think it was Giovanni). I’d restock the bar and often get into conversations, but mostly I just listened. He’d roll the floured dough out on a large long steel table and then slowly work it through a cutting machine. Over and over. It was tiresome work. I can’t remember if we were closed any days, but he did that six days a week, at least.

Oh, I almost forgot. One one the main reasons I took the job at Famous Luigi’s was this — they always fed the staff before the dinner shift started. So, we’d come in around 4:30 and the chef would have world-class pasted dishes waiting for everyone, from the dishwasher to the cooks to the waitstaff. He was always cheap on the meat (seems like whatever served was always vegetarian, probably to save money), but damn those complimentary house meals were delicious. When you eat food like that, it’s hard to go back to the other fake stuff.

The most desirable station to work at Famous Luigi’s was the atrium, which was out in front on the street. That’s where everyone wanted to sit. Trouble is, it was always either too hot or too cold.  Never just right. You see these atriums out on the sidewalks a lot in northeastern cities. The normal restaurant simply isn’t large enough, so, they jam in another dozen tables or more and suddenly a restaurant that was losing money or breaking even can now be profitable due to added tables and space. Of course, this only added to the immense stress placed upon the overworked kitchen, which had no capacity to handle 12 tables outside, another 15 or so inside, then 20 more upstairs. No wonder the food always seemed to “take forever.”

Where the hell is my Frutti di Mare?  We just made up excuses that the kitchen was backed up, which was always true.

Remember this, next time you eat in one of these old converted places. Oh, and it doesn’t matter if it’s Italian, or not. The same problems apply to most cuisines that operate restaurants with limited space.

I’d not thought of my old times working at Famous Luigi’s in many years. But then I drove by it sometime in 2008 when I was visiting Washington and the old neighborhood. That’s when I snapped this picture before it served its last meal after 70 years.

Famous Luigi’s finally closed for good in 2013.

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Note: We held a garage sale recently and I’m going through lots of stuff, including old photographs which I’ll be sharing in the coming days and weeks. My philosophy is — a photo does no good tucked away in an album or stored inside a box. A great photo should be shared, especially when it tells a story. Quoting Rod Stewart, “every picture tells a story (don’t it?).” This is Day 5 of the Every Picture Tells a Story project.