Joe Salamone did not believe he would really need to stop. It was almost midnight Wednesday when he returned in raw October weather from Rochester, where his supervisors at Paychex had needed him to be for the day. Salamone figured he would simply make sure no one was already in line for the new Chef’s on the Go at the Williamsville Place shopping center on Sheridan Drive.
He feels a strong connection to Chef’s, or more precisely to spaghetti parmesan, the signature dish of the landmark Seneca Street restaurant in Buffalo, which Buffalo News Food Editor Andrew Z. Galarneau has described as “spaghetti in sauce and butter under a blistered mozzarella quilt.” Salamone moved here from Brooklyn six years ago to live near the woman he was seeing, who introduced him to Chef’s. While that relationship ended, his romance with spaghetti parm did not.
“There’s nothing like it,” he said, and that is a Brooklyn guy talking.
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So when he heard the restaurant was joining with 97 Rock to offer free spaghetti parm for life to one of the first 97 people in line for the grand opening of this new Chef’s on the Go in Amherst, he figured he would get up early to be part of the drawing.
He did not expect what he saw at midnight: Three guys bundled up and waiting, which meant – if more people had that kind of ambition – the chance to qualify might not be there at dawn.
Salamone thought about it for a second, then pulled over. He threw on a Chef’s sweatshirt, a heavy jacket and some all-weather pants, and decided to stick around. He knew, even if he won nothing else, the 97 people in line were all promised a free morning dish of spaghetti parm.
It turned out that he need not have worried. He and his three new companions were hard core enthusiasts, and it was a long time before anyone else arrived.
Scott Mariglia, 27, the first in line, was there by 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. He is a middle school teacher at Christian Central Academy, and he said he had never before taken a day off from work, but then again, he had never fallen in love with any dish the way he loves spaghetti parm.
“I didn’t know it existed until three years ago,” he said. He was introduced to it through Mike Firth, father of Mariglia’s wife, Shannon, who bought him dinner in the days when Chef’s sent a food truck to Larkin Square. “He loves it like nobody’s business,” said Patricia Firth, Mariglia’s mother-in-law, who made him a special uniform for the all-night wait.
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She bought a chef’s jacket, emblazoned it with the formal Chef’s logo, then put the name and number of Buffalo Bills legend Bruce Smith on the back – because Smith, too, is a devotee of spaghetti parm.
Behind Mariglia were two Western New York buddies from their time in the Army: Nick Bello, 23, and Trevor Bowman, 26. They met at Fort Drum, where food was the password to their Buffalo connection. All it took, Bello recalls, were the words “Mighty Taco” and “Loganberry,” and he and Bowman barely needed to say anything else.
They became good friends, a bond that remained strong after they left the service. Bowman, a North Tonawanda native, was already a disciple of such regional specialties as wings, haddock fish fries and beef on weck, but he had never tried spaghetti parm until he took the lead from Bello.
One trip to Chef’s and he was finished. Bello now studies at Mohawk Valley Community College, about 200 miles away, but when he read about the drawing, he knew he was going home. He finished his last class Wednesday and drove through the blinding rain to meet Bowman at Chef’s on the Go, arriving about three hours after Mariglia and maybe an hour before Salamone.
They were the trailblazers. They spent the night talking about religion, family, and the Bills and the Sabres. The two teams are off to their best combined start in Buffalo since 2008, which we all hope is not a perfect corollary, because the ending was not as happy as the beginning.
Amid a cold rain that started to fall around 3 a.m., Bello offered a few stories of how he belongs to a group called “GhostHub” that goes looking for spirits. He told of a slamming door in the middle of the night at Fantasy Island’s western town, a tale he shared beneath the streetlights of a lonesome parking lot.
A couple of hours later, more people began showing up. The next group included Kelly Dodson, 60, a former tractor-trailer driver whose late father was a city police officer. Not long ago, Dodson won free coffee for a year from one of those 24/7 chains. Laughing a wonderfully explosive laugh, she said she kind of liked the idea of free coffee washing down free spaghetti parm.
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She was also the first person in line old enough to remember a key player in the spaghetti parm origin story: Dodson grew up watching former WKBW-TV legend Dave Thomas, born in Buffalo as David Boreanaz and later known on Philadelphia television as weatherman Dave Roberts.
Thomas and his wife, Patti, were special guests at Thursday’s grand opening. The applause for them was eclipsed only by the cheers for 86-year-old Chef’s waitress Shirley Beam, who waved to the crowd even as her instinct was to get to work behind the counter.
As for Thomas, he recalled – during the days when he hosted the legendary children’s program Rocketship 7 and hung around with Mr. Beeper and Promo the Robot, preschool heroes to Western New Yorkers of the postwar Baby Boom – how he began making morning stops at Chef’s, where he grew close with the late Louis Billittier Sr.
The story goes that on a morning like any morning, Louis Sr. and Thomas started throwing around ideas that led to the steaming, doubled-plated phenomenon now known as spaghetti parmesan, a notion that Louis Jr. and his sister Mary Beth, today’s owners, hope will spread nationally through these outlets known as Chef’s on the Go.
Now, for the big question: Did one of our four all-night stalwarts win the big prize? Well, yes and no. As Chef’s mascot Paisano watched with fierce anticipation, Louis Jr. pulled the name of Julie Vacanti, 60, from a barrel. She is a respiratory therapist who was there on the urging of her daughter Kaitlyn.
Vacanti was so happy she started crying, because she loves Chef’s and “is all about Buffalo” and had never really won anything in her life. For the full dimensions of her prize, consider this:
If Vacanti picks up one large and steaming order on every business day from today until the moment she turns 90, she would be the recipient of more than $100,000 worth of spaghetti parm.
She goes back far enough to remember when Rocketship 7 sent you off to school, which made it feel a little special to shake hands with Thomas, just after the Billittiers cut one long cardboard strand of spaghetti to open the place. Thomas, true to his profession, offered this observation:
“Only Buffalo people would come out in weather like this.”
That praise was especially true for the first four guys in line. Mariglia, Bello, Bowman and Salamone all said they would have been content with their free meal, but they did considerably better. Louis Billittier Jr. was stunned to learn how long they stayed out there in the rain, and he put them at the table closest to the counter and made a promise:
“We’ll pick a night and those guys can stop down and we’ll give them dinner and then we’ll take them to a Sabres game,” he said. At their table, the little group of one-time strangers exchanged nods and glances and prepared to leave as friends, the day’s second lifetime gift provided by spaghetti parm.
Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Buffalo News. Email him at skirst@buffalonews.com or read more of his work in this archive.
