In Honor Of Father: A restaurant name recalls a cherished life of love and food
When Walter Pisano decided to name his restaurant Tulio, after his father, he had no way of knowing that Dad would eventually occupy the limelight in the dining room. But John Tulio Pisano, formerly known as J.P., started introducing himself as Tulio as soon as he set foot in his son's restaurant when it opened in 1992. His natural charm, polished by nearly 50 years of professional restaurateuring in New York City, won him many friends and admirers among Tulio's clientele.
"When I was a kid," recalls the younger Pisano, "Dad worked on Park Avenue at clubby restaurants like 'Blue Print 100' and 'Le Champs.' They were swank places where people like Frank Sinatra and Robert De Niro could be spotted." For a time, Pisano senior owned a nightclub, The Pink Elephant on Coney Island. During those years, "Dad worked from 7:30 in the morning until about 11:30 at night."
Born in Brooklyn to parents who had emigrated from southern Italy, John Pisano served in World War II, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge and climbing a flagpole when the battle was over to rip down a Nazi flag. After the war, he married a blue-eyed Scottish woman named Flora who learned to cook all the traditional Italian dishes he loved by watching his mother and sisters.
The Italian-American culture that Tulio grew up in vanished when his generation left their urban row houses to raise the next generation in the suburbs. Walter Pisano was part of that generation, leaving Brooklyn as a preschooler to grow up in New Jersey.
Still, his high school was full of Italians, he recalls. "And it was funny that I had this Scottish mother. My friends would come over and all this Italian food was coming out of the kitchen — antipasto platters, pasta dishes and crazy things like pig's feet and stuffed tripe. Then Mom would say something in her Scottish brogue and they would be just baffled." Flora died in 1993, and Tulio stayed in Seattle, where he had already been "visiting" for several years to be near sons Walter and John.
Walter had come West in 1977 to a small Idaho restaurant, where he was trained in classical Continental cuisine. He moved on to Seattle in 1980 to work at The Sorrento Hotel, where he helped open The Hunt Club. Not long after breaking for a culinary tour of Europe, he went to work at Gerard's Relais de Lyon in Bothell. It was there he met legendary chef Jean-Louis Palladin, then in the prime of his career at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.
"I asked Gerard if he might be able to get me into Palladin's kitchen to work for a few weeks, just so I could see what he was doing. Gerard came back with one of those 'good news/bad news' answers. 'You can work at The Watergate,' he said, 'but only if you agree to be Palladin's sous chef for a year.' I didn't even blink," says Pisano. "There are only so many opportunities in life." Only when the offer came to open his own restaurant did Pisano come back to Seattle.
Technically, Tulio had nothing to do with the restaurant that bore his name. When the Kimpton group hired Walter to open an Italian restaurant in the Hotel Vintage Park, company executive Bob Puccini escorted him to San Francisco, where they explored restaurants and brainstormed about styles and names for the project.
"We talked about Bella this and Cucina that," says Pisano, "but there was too much of that. Then we talked about family names." He thought of his dad's middle name, "and as soon as I said it, I knew we were onto something. The next day, I called Dad to ask if it was OK."
According to Walter's wife Deborah, John feigned indifference at first. But it wasn't long before he was swanning around the dining room with his smile and his pinky ring flashing. He did more than work the floor; he worked Walter.
"Any time I started to get too fancy, you know, if I served something over the top, Dad would say, 'Don't forget where you came from,' and he would start talking about some simple dish like linguini with clams, and my mouth would start watering and I'd remember all the foods that made me who I am."
One of his best memories of food came when he was working for Palladin. On a rare day off he went to visit his dad's sister, Aunt Millie. "She was in her 80s. She opened the door and even though I hadn't laid eyes on her in over a decade, she looked exactly the same. She started bringing out pasta dishes and roasts, three different desserts. And the ricotta cake, it was just a pound-cake kind of thing, but it was so simple and honest. That's how my father's family cooked."
At the restaurant, Tulio would work three, maybe four nights a month, says Walter, and get invitations from all kinds of people asking him to go out on their boat or stay at their vacation home. "I'm here 24/seven, and I don't get that. People would call and ask if Tulio was going to be in before they would make their reservation. It's funny." Trying to pinpoint exactly what it was that made his dad so charming, Walter hesitates for just a moment. "People always said that he seemed very interested in what they were saying."
When the family found out Tulio had cancer, Walter recalls, they couldn't believe it. "He had just turned 77, but he looked like he was in his 50s. He was so passionate about life, so very much alive. He called me not long after he was diagnosed, and you know, he didn't talk about treatment or cancer, or any of that. He just started talking about what he had cooked that day. 'I went down to the Pike Place Market today, Walter, and I got some of those little tomatoes that you use in the restaurant. I sautéed them in some olive oil and I threw in some clams.' " That's how it was with his dad, says Walter, who lost Tulio to the cancer last year. "Our whole life together revolved around what we ate."
Greg Atkinson is executive chef at Canlis and chef at the Puget Sound Environmental Center.