Many restaurateurs got their start at Minard’s

November/December 2014

BY MARY WADE BURNSIDE
NCWV LIFE

Minard’s. Muriale’s. Oliverio’s.
In North Central West Virginia, those surnames tickle the taste buds and conjure images of calamari and caprese, bruschetta and spaghetti, garlic and oregano and pots of pomodoro simmering on the stove, awaiting a plate of pasta, some meatballs and shaved pecorino romano over top.
Add in Twin Oaks, the Red Caboose and the Greenbrier Motel & Restaurant, and a list emerges of just about every Italian restaurant in two counties in an area that admittedly has a heaping helping of eateries in which the menu emanates from the boot-shaped Mediterranean country.
A casual glance might not catch a connection but one does indeed exist beyond the obvious comparisons.
A photo from the mid-1960s provides a clue: Joe Minard, Rocco Muriale — the one who now owns Rocco’s Ristorante in Ceredo, not Muriale’s in Fairmont — and Sonny Oliverio, standing and smiling by the commercial stove in the kitchen at Minard’s Spaghetti Inn, which Joe’s mom and dad, Mike and Rose, started out of their home in 1937 on old Route 50 in the Kelly Hill neighborhood of Clarksburg.
And that’s where it all began, 77 years ago, after two sisters named Rose and Agnes Oliverio had married two brothers, Michael and Samuel Minard, and set out to make a living recreating the recipes that their relatives had brought over with them from San Giovanni in Fiore in Calabria, Italy.
At the time, no one realized it, but a spaghetti sphere of sorts was being established, as relatives and neighbors from Kelly Hill began chopping vegetables or assembling salads or waiting tables at Minard’s, often as a second job, before going off and establishing their own restaurants.
“We didn’t open until 4,” recalled Tressa Minard Wolfe, Joe’s double first cousin, the daughter of Agnes and Sam. “That’s why most of them got into the food business.”
They worked day jobs, maybe at the steel mill down the street, or one of the area’s many glass factories, or at the Works Progress Administration, like Joe’s father, or the sheriff’s department, like Tressa’s father.
Then, to help make ends meet and to help out their relatives’ budding business, they lent a hand during the evenings at Minard’s.
“They were the true definition of entrepreneurs,” Wolfe added.
So much so that in 1957, Michael Ielapi and his brothers Joseph and Samuel Ielapi, the sons of Susan Minard, a sister to the Minard brothers, went up old Route 50 a bit to Bridgeport and opened up their own sandwich and pizza place called Twin Oaks just before the big curve in the road with the cowhead billboard that advertised the stockyards once located where the Rite Aid now stands.
In 1966, Sonny Oliverio, whose father, Pete, was a brother to Rose and Agnes, opened up Sonny’s Restaurant even farther up old Route 50 — before you get to the life-sized giraffe statue that now stands sentry by the road guarding Alfred Construction — offering hoagies with peppers and soft-serve ice cream.
Then in 1969, brothers Frank and Sam Muriale, whose grandmother, Filomena Angotti, was a sister to Joe Minard’s grandmother, went in a different direction, to Fairmont, and opened up Muriale’s Italian Restaurant, when today’s current owner, Frank’s son, Rocco, was attending Fairmont State College. Then, in the 1970s, Sam’s son, also named Rocco Muriale, moved to Ceredo and established Rocco’s Ristorante.
In the meantime, Albert “Engine” Arco and his wife Rosemary already had gone down the block and opened the Red Caboose — a riff on Engine’s nickname; and Frank and Mary Victoria Loria bought a motel and restaurant in Nutter Fort and gave it the same as the well-known White Sulphur Springs resort around the same time that Sonny’s was established.
They all started out small — both in seating and menu size — and casual, at first mostly avoiding the dish that made Minard’s famous, spaghetti.
“It’s all a big web,” Wolfe said.
Added her cousin, Joe Minard, who today serves as a co-owner of the restaurant with Wolfe. “My mother teased that we should have opened up a cooking school.”

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Kelly Hill comprises a few blocks in the East End of Clarksburg. Back when Minard was growing up, several Catholic churches were within walking distance, including St. John’s, largely attended by Italian-Americans; Holy Rosary, established by the Slovak community; and Immaculate Conception, where many Irish-Americans worshipped.
“Back in those early days, every neighborhood had their own little clique,” Minard said. “They each had their own church. I can remember the Polish church would have mass in Polish. Things were different back then in the late ’30s and early ’40s.”
Clarksburg featured several neighborhoods that boasted citizens of Italian descent, including Glen Elk, where Frank Iaquinta launched Julio’s Café in the 1960s; and North View, home of Marino Brothers. But the Minard family made the small enclave of Kelly Hill an influential contributor to the area’s Italian cuisine.
“One thing you can say is that Kelly Hill is kind of the cradle of Italian restaurants in North Central West Virginia,” Minard said.
Plus, the family of Joe’s aunt, Mary Minard Skinner, opened the Clique Club, which still stands on old Bridgeport Hill up the road from Minard’s.
At Minard’s, the murals and stained glass and built-in cupboards tell a story, one of starting a business in the home and how to creatively expand it as “it grew and grew and grew,” as Wolfe said.
Originally a duplex, Minard’s housed Mike and Rose and their four children and Sam and Agnes and their two daughters. The family’s two china cupboards highlight how this used to be someone’s home.
“On one side, I put Aunt Rose and Uncle Mike wedding photo with their antiques, and on the other side, I put my mother and father’s wedding picture with their antiques.”
Rose collected elephants, which stand behind the glass to this day.
“That was their dining room and the front rooms were their living rooms,” Wolfe added.
When the restaurant took off and another room was added, a window that once looked to the outside was filled with stained glass, or turned into a mural, or made into coves where statues stand today.
The large dining table beneath the stained glass window was the first where food was served to guests, and it also originated in the home.
“We had to have a divider made to enlarge it,” Wolfe said. “We call it the family table because families request to eat there.”
“When you are coming to this restaurant, you are coming to our house to eat,” she added, remembering the days when the kids would come home and eat their supper before being shuffled upstairs to do homework while the parents served spaghetti to customers below.
“We use that as a slogan.”
But at Minard’s, the real story is the spaghetti, the dish that bears a prominent place in the restaurant’s name.
“The coal mines had gone down,” Wolfe said. “Both fathers worked in coal mines and the steel mill. And so they had to figure out a way to feed their family. That was one of ideas they came up with. ‘Let’s see what we can do.’ Back then, for entertainment, that’s what you did, you went to each other’s home to eat. They thought, ‘The spaghetti is so good. Why don’t take something that is great and share it and see what happens?'”
Of course, the secret to the spaghetti — everybody’s spaghetti — is the sauce, generally a well-guarded secret handed down from generation to generation.
Wolfe and her cousins and siblings grew up eating the Minard family’s take on the topping, a more heavy meat sauce, and that is what the restaurant serves.
“My Grandmother Oliverio’s sauce was more of a light marinara,” she added. “Although she would serve meat, it didn’t have as much meat in their sauce as we had in ours.
“When I was little, we would leave here and visit Grandmother Oliverio and eat in her kitchen because the sauces were so different.”
Jim Ielapi, whose Uncle Mike founded Twin Oaks with the help of Jim’s dad, Joseph, and their brother, Samuel, remembers the stories he has heard about how uncles and aunts and cousins pitched in and worked at Minard’s. He was born a couple years after Twin Oaks was established.
“It was all family,” Ielapi said, who manages the restaurant that is co-owned by some family members, including his Uncle Mike and his mother, Katheryn, who still makes the restaurant’s pizza dough in an overnight process, two days a week.
“They all grew up together and were all raised together during the Depression, and they all worked at Minard’s. It was like a house and they kept the same image, with the spaghetti house tradition.
“People used to bring their pots and pans. Some of the stories I remember growing up, hearing it from my father and uncles, was that families would order take-out spaghetti and they would bring their pots and pans. They would fill up their pot and go home with it.”
Eventually, Twin Oaks and the other restaurants also began serving spaghetti, but even though many claimed Minard ancestry, they avoided using the same sauce recipe.
“With my grandmother being a Minard, they all kind of shared recipes,” Ielapi added. “They all cooked there. But we all kind of changed the recipes as we went into business. Our sauce is different than Minard’s. Our sauce is different than Oliverio’s. That’s what makes it unique. Even though our family members worked at Minard’s, the recipes are different at each restaurant.”

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A recent photo shoot at Minard’s turned into an impromptu family reunion as many of the area’s Italian restaurant owners gathered and hugged and chatted about a variety of topics.
Rocco Muriale, who now owns Muriale’s Restaurant in Fairmont, walked over to one of the tables and pointed.
“That’s the table where I got more lectures from my dad,” he laughed. “Mom would call dad and he would tell me to get my butt up here.”
His father, Frank, had a day job at a meatpacking company and then spent his evenings as a cook at Minard’s, where he also utilized his butcher skills to hand-cut the steaks. When Frank and his brother Sam established Muriale’s, Rocco did not have a lot of experience.
“I never had cooked except a little bit at home,” Muriale said. “They taught me how to do certain things, like pizza and hoagies. I just learned a little bit at a time.”
Of course, just like at Minard’s, it was a family affair, with Rocco’s mom, Violet, and Sam’s wife, Rose, and his grandmother, Isabella, also pitching in, as did his cousin, Rocco, and his brother Rick.
“They were both working a couple of jobs at the time and I just think they felt they wanted to be their own boss,” Muriale said of his father and uncle. “So they decided to open up a small restaurant. At the time we opened, we only seated 32 people.”
Now after several additions and expansions, the restaurant seats close to 250 and features a sports bar filled with memorabilia, including a tiny gymnastics uniform once worn by Mary Lou Retton, who grew up a stone’s throw away in the Fairmont neighborhood of Watson.
The menu has expanded too, but still includes Aunt Mary’s Lasagna, named after Rocco’s father and uncle’s sister who worked at the restaurant for years.
Muriale himself grew up in Kelly Hill and remembers the importance not just food, of course, but the Italian cooking that had been handed down by generations.
“My grandmother lived two houses up from where I grew up,” he remembered. “So it was not unusual that I would stop in at some point in time in the morning to see my grandmother. She might make some Italian toast — just some Italian bread, toasted. She would bake her own bread.
“But she would make some wonderful sauces. Her spaghetti sauce, I still remember that vividly. What they would do back then is they would get the tomato sauce and put chunks of beef or pork or veal into the sauce and let it simmer. Those are your three main meats in Italian cuisine.”
In fact, he calls them “the holy trinity of meat.” Add in fresh basil, fresh oregano and fresh mint, and then the aroma would begin to fill the home.
“What was so special about that time is I would stop in for lunch and if my grandmother was fixing us something to eat, she could just go out into the garden and grab a couple of tomatoes and some basil, a couple of slices of Italian toast and make us a wonderful tomato salad over toast.”
Muriale offers pleasant memories of a childhood where the gardens produced not only fresh herbs and spices but also vegetables and some fruits as well.
“I remember the time in the neighborhood that the ladies would do a lot of their canning, whether it be tomatoes, green beans,” he recalled. “Probably my favorite time during the canning season was when the Italian ladies would do the peaches. Peaches just brought a wonderful smell to the house and to the neighborhood and to this day when I smell fresh basil it takes me back to my grandmother’s back yard porch.”

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John Arco also grew up in Kelly Hill and paints a bit of a different picture.
“My grandparents were bootleggers during Prohibition,” he said. “We were of Italian descent and we were bookies, which means we booked parlays and numbers and football and everything like that.”
The family did not make moonshine, Arco said. “That’s the rednecks.”
Instead, “Italians made wine and home brew. We didn’t have a still.”
Arco recalls a close-knit group of family members and neighbors in Kelly Hill.
“We stuck together,” he said.
The Red Caboose had its roots as a bar but eventually it evolved into a restaurant.
“My mom worked there,” Arco said. “We made spaghetti and our own sauce. She’d make a few Italian dishes that we would sell.”
The menu expanded from spaghetti to include everything from hoagies and giovanni sandwiches to Italian specialties such as pasta fagioli; tiella, a layered dish featuring potatoes, zucchini and meat with bread crumbs and parmesan cheese; and minestra, a stew made of greens, potatoes and sausage.
Eventually, Arco himself took on the chef duties, learning his skills from his mother, Rosemary, and her mother, Genevieve Clemente.
“I can make any Italian dish,” he said. “I’m the one that keeps the tradition. I make the tiella. I can make scampi — anything Italian. Puttanesca or any sauce — marinara, diablo, alfredo, anything. You name it, I can cook it.”
As for his connection to the other Italian cuisine restaurateurs in the area, “I’m related to the Minards, the Muriales, the Oliverios. Just about everybody in the restaurant business. They’re my cousins. We’re all related.”
Terri Loria Bellotte, who runs the Greenbrier Motel & Restaurant with her sister, Mary Arbonaise, also is unsure of her exact connection to the crew in Kelly Hill, where her mother, Mary Victoria Loria, grew up.
However, “Everybody in Kelly Hill is related,” she said.
Plus, her grandfather, Peter Lopez, was best friends with Mike Minard, Joe’s dad.
“They were as close as brothers,” Joe Minard remembered.
Lopez had a pizza place and bar near Minard’s called Pete’s Place.
“It was like a beer joint and restaurant,” Bellotte said. “My grandmother and mother cooked.”
Then her parents, Frank and Mary Loria, established the Greenbrier in 1965, and nearly 50 years later, many traditions remain.
“We still make our own pasta at the restaurant,” Bellotte said. “We make our own bread. We make our own sauces. We make our own sausage. We make our own canned peppers. We make Christmas cookies. We still do all the old Italian traditions.”

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Peter Anthony “Sonny” Oliverio was born in Kelly Hill but actually grew up in East View on the other side of Main Street.
“But he worked at Minard’s, for his aunts and uncles,” recalled his daughter, Petrina Oliverio Bonamico, who now serves as a general manager of Oliverio’s Ristorante in Bridgeport.
“That was before I was born.”
He bought the building that would become Sonny’s the same year Bonamico was born, in 1965, as he and his wife, Shirley, began building a business that would sustain their growing brood. The restaurant served pizza, hoagies, hot dogs, fried chicken, hot dogs and ice cream.
Back then, Bonamico noted, Bridgeport — and pretty much Clarksburg — did not have a McDonald’s or a Hardee’s or many other fast-food chain restaurants, and so Sonny’s helped to fill that niche.
Fast-forward 22 years, in 1988, when a fire damaged Sonny’s.
“My father wanted to just clean up and just start over where we were before, but my mother thought this would be a great time to make some changes,” Bonamico said.
So Sonny’s evolved into Oliverio’s Ristorante, a fine-dining establishment where the menu now features such dishes as Mushroom Sacchetti, Steak and Portabella Ravioli, Penne Olio and Lobster Mac and Cheese.
And then, of course, there was Shirley’s idea to take her bread and roll them into breadsticks, now a signature item at Oliverio’s.
“That was genius,” Bonamico said. “A lot of people come for the breadsticks.”
Most of Sonny and Shirley’s children have a hand in the business now. In addition to Petrina, brothers Phil and Patrick also serve as owners and managers. Sister Polly Oliverio Washburn and her husband, Todd, run the Oliverio’s location in the Wharf District, which opened in 2001. It will be moving to a new location near Monongalia General Hospital this spring and will be combined with the recently-closed Oliverio’s Marketplace, which Pat’s wife, Carla Casalinouva Oliverio, manages.
And Petrina’s husband, Nunzio Bonamico, manages Via Veneto, the family’s Bridgeport catering location.
Only sister Patti Oliverio Simon does not work for Oliverio’s directly. However, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, she owns and operates Almost Heaven Desserts in Bridgeport, providing delicacies such as tiramisu and cheesecake, including the most popular Chambord flavor, to the restaurants.
Sonny died in 2004, but not before his children had established their livelihoods in the business he had started nearly 40 years earlier — in the same way that Minard’s had given Sonny his start.

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These days, Tressa Wolfe runs Minard’s Spaghetti House and her husband, Stan, serves as the general manager. Her cousin, Joe, spent several years as a West Virginia state senator and now works in Charleston as the Senate clerk. He commutes back to Clarksburg on weekends.
He remembers when his parents, Mike and Rose, established Minard’s back in 1937.
“It was strictly a family-owned thing,” he said. “I was the first dishwasher, me and a guy from Kelly Hill. I had to stand on a box to reach the double tubs. I was too small to reach the double tubs to wash the dishes.”
The “guy from Kelly Hill,” Sam Hunter, eventually went to work as the cook at the nearby Wonder Bar, opened in 1946 by John and Betty Folio.
“He became their cook for over 40 years,” Minard said. “When we needed people, there were people in the neighborhood. We’d go outside and say, ‘We need help,’ and boom. It was mostly our cousins — Ielapis, Skinners, Oliverios and Carvellis. Everyone that worked was part of the family. That’s how they all got started.”
From serving a few diners in their home, Minard’s has evolved into a restaurant that now seats about 120 customers. Other things have changed too, like the previous Sunday-only lasagna rule.
“The mothers made lasagna only as a Sunday dish,” Wolfe remembered. “People liked it on Sunday and said, ‘Why can’t we get it through the week?'”
Often dishes would start as a special, with the Minard’s faithful followers testing it before it would be added to the menu.
“Nothing gets out in dining room until we have tasted it and tweaked it and we think it’s the best we can make,” Wolfe added.
The fact that so many area restaurants had their start at Minard’s does not faze Wolfe, who noted that other relatives operate eateries in Pennsylvania and Michigan, expanding the spaghetti sphere even farther than North Central West Virginia.
“That’s how far we reach,” she said.
And she waxes philosophical about those who got their start in Mike and Rose and Sam and Agnes’ kitchen and then went off to craft their own culinary careers.
“This was a stepping stone in a lot of people’s lives,” she said. “Did we create those businesses? Absolutely not. But we offered opportunities for people to develop themselves and decide what they wanted to do. And look at how successful they are. Look at the Oliverio kids. They worked under their father and learned from their father.
“And all of that comes from sharing what you know and teaching the younger generation what we know. I don’t think that can be acquired through a textbook.”