Father and son's life revolves around pizza
FAVEROS | For a father and son, life revolves around pizza, customers, enjoying life
Like father, like son.
For Chris ("Big Frankie") Favero and his father, Nino, the likeness extends far beyond shared preferences for sausage pizza and the White Sox.
(Chris Sweda/Sun-Times)
While his young friends were fishing and hunting with their fathers, Chris was learning how to chop onions and carrots, peel shrimp, grind sausage and make pizza crust -- and he was scavenging through Dumpsters behind competing restaurants trying to determine purveyors of quality foods.
"It meant I got to know my dad on a whole other level," explains the 43-year-old Chris, a 20-year employee of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, Inc., and vice president of Frankie's Fifth Floor Pizzeria, Frankie's Scaloppine and Chicago Flat Sammies.
Chris credits Nino, the 83-year-old patriarch of the Favero clan and founder/owner of Nino's Pizza in Chicago Heights, Matteson and Alsip, with teaching him the fundamentals of making quality pizza, operating a restaurant, appreciating customers and enjoying life.
As it turns out, it was Nino's recipe for success.
"When I was 10, Dad and I would work from 3:30 to 8 [p.m.] Sundays in a corner of Nino's making different styles of pizzas," Chris reminisces. "As soon as the customers left, we would close. So by 8:30 or 9 we were checking out other people's restaurants. Dad was never done with something -- he was always looking for the best recipes and the best products to make his restaurants better.
"If there was a product Dad especially liked, I would hop in the Dumpster behind the [competing] restaurant searching for labels that would tell us the name of the packing house -- and Monday, Dad would be on the phone with that purveyor. We would always end Sundays at Mario's for Italian ice."
Along the way, Nino also stressed ingredients critical to his recipe.
"Dad taught me about accountability and compassion -- that race, color and creed don't matter," emphasizes Chris, looking lovingly at his father in a private board room in Frankie's Scaloppine, 900 N. Michigan. "One time at our Matteson store -- it was out in the sticks at the time -- a traveling migrant worker and his family stopped because they had car troubles. My dad let him camp in our parking lot, and my dad fed the family every day. Those are things you remember as an adult."
"We both love people and we love our God," interjects Nino, oblivious to the stir created by the presence of Barbara Walters in Scaloppine and his son's sudden exit to tend to the unexpected celebrity.
Nino, who grew up selling newspapers and earning 5 cents an hour working in a hot dog stand, 5 cents for a shoe shine and $1.50 a day caddying, first worked in a pizzeria when he returned from Coast Guard service. His first Nino's Pizza, which opened in 1950, failed. Then Nino and his wife, Mary, and their eight children moved to Matteson and opened a Nino's.
"We wouldn't have made it had Mary and the kids not have helped out. They really rallied 'round me," Nino emphasizes. "They did the chores -- whether it was making beef sandwiches or sweeping the parking lot -- and the older siblings would put their paychecks on the family table to pay for the mortgage."
"Those were different times," Nino acknowledges.
"What a sight we were! Restaurants would love to see us come in. We would frequent this Greek restaurant called Nick's Fat Man. We would order eight slices of banana cream pie, eight milk shakes, eight hamburgers, eight orders of fries, and two orders of onion rings," recalls Nino, now married 64 years.
"After, Dad would park our car and make us kids run two laps around the park," adds Chris, now an Evanston resident and father of Carly, 18; Ben, 15, and Nathan, 11.
Those were the times when Nino's classic pizzas -- cheese, sausage or pepperoni -- were the norm. On holidays, the Favero clan feasted on roast chicken, corned beef, polenta, risotto, and green gravy (a spread of parsley, anchovy, garlic and Parmesan). Even Chris hadn't envisioned the gourmet thin crust (potato and rosemary, chicken and pesto, arugula and prosciutto) and Sardinian (fennel and rosemary, red onion, Parmesan and anchovy) pizzas he now serves from a wood-burning pizza stove at Frankie's Pizzeria.
These days, Nino winks at the subject of retirement; after all, he is still needed to check on the refrigeration, stock and cleanliness at Nino's three locations. Nino also braves traveling from his Matteson home on Chicago's expressways (often with his grandchildren as drivers) to occasionally spend time in his son's Scaloppine kitchen. "I ask the kitchen staff, 'Are you guys behavin'? I give advice, and there's lots of hugging and kissing -- I'm like an absentee father to many on the kitchen staff," he says, obviously enjoying the relationship.
And, when asked, Nino Favero doesn't hesitate to share his not-too-secret recipe for success: "Hard work mixed with love."
Sandy Thorn Clark is a local free-lance writer.