It’s 1:30 in the afternoon and Nick Perrino and his son, Joe, are arguing about mozzarella cheese. Nick–a hardy 77 years old with a chest big as an institutional soup cauldron and an accent as thick as good spaghetti sauce–insists that cheese from a 20-pound block tastes different than cheese from a 5-pound block. Joe–trim and businesslike in a white shirt, red sweater vest, and lawyerly tortoise-shell glasses–thinks they taste the same when they’re melted.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
And inside the Italianate parapets of that building, where Joe and Nick debate, waitresses of many ages and cultural backgrounds, with metal coin changers strapped to their hips, speed by on their way to serve patrons so varied they seem to have issued from a giant Lotto ball scrambler containing representatives of every race and nationality in Chicago.
Joe and Nick are arguing about cheese in a manner audible to patrons in nearby booths. Between bites of Chicken Vesuvio from the all-you-can-eat lunch buffet, Nick points his fork at Joe. “What do you know about cooking anyway?” he challenges. It was Nick, after all, who got the pat on the back from General George S. Patton for serving iced cocoa to troops at his steamy Florida base, rather than hot cocoa, as the nationwide Army menu prescribed. “To me that was the greatest day in my life,” Nick says seriously.
“This is what I enjoy,” Nick says. “Talking to people that was here years ago and they come back.” He asks a waitress to get some Home Run Inn calendars for the woman from the trunk of his car. Then another waitress shows up at the table with a giant framed photo of the old, plank-sided saloon, the one–Nick says, beginning the story–whose windows were occasionally shattered by well-hit long balls from Piotrowski Park across the street (hence the name Home Run Inn); the saloon where his father-in-law died behind the now formica-topped bar when Nick was still in the service; the one Nick saved from bankruptcy during the Depression, when he was working at his uncle’s gas station after his father went back to Italy (never to return) and Nick was courting his future wife, Loretta; the one with modest living quarters in the back where, after his hitch in the Army, he and Loretta shared a mattress on the floor while his mother-in-law slept on box springs.
Sometimes Nick still finds it hard to believe that a kid born in tiny Bari, Sicily, who “used to cry for a piece of bread” when he was young, and who, with a second-grade education and no knowledge of English, came to this country alone at 16 to join his father and uncle, could have succeeded so spectacularly. Could own a factory that produces 15 to 20 thousand pizzas a week and a restaurant that produces 6,500 to 7,000 pizzas a week–1,800 on a good Friday or Saturday, and they don’t deliver. A restaurant whose walls are festooned with photos of him with every mayor from Daley to Washington (not to mention innumerable shots of Governor Jim Thompson, who once made a campaign stop there); with a computer keeping track of orders, a recording of a sultry-voiced woman touting Home Run Inn pizza, lasagna, and T-shirts while callers wait to place orders by phone; a staff of 180, 30 of them working shoulder-to-shoulder at any given time in a kitchen that is a cross between an electronics assembly plant and Santa’s workshop.
