Pizzutis Italian Bistro

When a diner at Morehead City’s A Taste of Italy wants to thank the preparer of a particularly satisfying dish, Pizzuti obliges in her own inimitable style.

“Why don’t you go back there and tell him yourself?” she says, and a delightful, frequent laugh follows. “Just be careful of the floor. It’s a little slippery.”

Pizzuti, the co-owner and face of the restaurant, isn’t being dismissive. She’s being her personable, charming, hilarious, tell-it-like-it-is self, and she never turns it off.

A Brooklyn native who moved to Italy when she was 18, Pizzuti works the softly lit, handsomely appointed room with a natural ease. She stops at a table and greets a group of regulars out of earshot, with the exception of intermittent bursts of laughter arising from her guests.

Later she sits down with a group and has a glass of wine, and they laugh, too. She jokes with her staff as they walk by in a blur, making them feel less like employees and more like family.

Pizzuti, 53, is part manager, part hostess, part mom and part standup comic. Dinner at the restaurant resembles dinner at her home, and that’s just the way she likes it.

Connoisseurs of exceptional cuisine, fine wine and immoderate merriment can find everything they’re looking for in this quaint, authentically Italian establishment.

Pizzuti and her husband, Francesco, the Italian-born chef, ran the restaurant in Atlantic Beach as Pizzuti’s for five years before changing names and staking out a high-visibility location on Arendell Street three years ago. They renovated the former office building of a grocery store, turning what was a mundane, spartan structure into a cozy draw for lovers of life’s finer things.

Visitors are welcomed through the restaurant’s small bar area before entering the main dining room, which is painted an inviting red. The building’s ordinary facade belies the elegance of the interior. “Once somebody comes in here they say, ‘Oh my God! I could kick myself that I didn’t come earlier,’ ” says Gloria Pizzuti, in a rare moment of semi-seriousness. “You don’t think that you’d come in and you’d see this kind of ambiance when you see the outside of the building.”

The menu includes classic pasta dishes from spaghetti Carbonara to cappellini Bolognese, as well as chicken, veal and seafood creations, the latter of which is the chef’s specialty. A Taste of Italy’s wine list includes many Italian selections to complement both the food and the company.

Like many couples who run restaurants, Gloria Pizzuti works the front of the house while Francesco works the back. The banter between the two goes back and forth, sometimes in English, usually in Italian and serious only when it absolutely has to be.

Asked by a visitor, in the hours before the restaurant opens for the evening, when the two met, Gloria retreats from a dining room table to the swinging kitchen door. She opens it and yells, “How old was I when I met you? How long do I know you?” A muffled, distant answer comes back from her husband.

She returns to the table, sits down and deadpans, “I was 10 days old when I met him.”

Second Nature
It would be incorrect to say the Pizzutis have their restaurant’s operation down to a science. That process began decades ago, well before they knew one another.

Gloria Pizzuti grew up working in her family’s New York restaurants, and she likes to say she was in the business before she was born. Her fatherwas a chef, her mother’s father was a chef and a brother and sister are chefs. Her dad cooked on cruise ships until she was about 10, when he opened his first restaurant. When she was 14, he opened an upscale supper club in New Jersey, complete with a stage for live entertainment, a dance floor, two bars and three dining rooms.

This was the genesis of her restaurant experience, where the bug bit her and never let go.

“We just didn’t play,” Gloria, the oldest of four children, says of her childhood. “Play was breading a veal cutlet and then scrambling eggs or making a cake. That’s how we grew up.”

At 18, “ready to move on,” she recalls, Gloria moved to Venice. She was in Italy for 11 years, helping her father and brother run a restaurant there. It was in the mother country that she met Francesco, a police officer four years her junior, in a discotheque. She asked him to dance. He obliged and they’ve been together ever since.

There was just one problem: Francesco’s idea of cooking was making a pot of coffee. They got married anyway and moved from Italy to New Jersey in 1983. While he dabbled in construction, Francesco, who grew up in a suburb of Rome, went to work in her father’s place—without pay—for six months.

With a bit of a practical education in the business, he then ventured out to other restaurants.

“Every couple of months I would change places to learn as much as I can from other people,” Francesco says in his accent through a thick moustache. Adds his wife: “His resume looked like a phone book that year.”

Along the way, Francesco gleaned the art of his homeland’s culinary techniques, which are best left uncomplicated. “Italian food is good when it’s simple, when you can taste all the flavors and ingredients that are in a dish,” says Gloria. “Not one more than another, but they blend together and make this fantastic serenade in your mouth when you eat it.”

The couple opened a restaurant in New Jersey that was similar to their current establishment. Eventually, with a desire to be near the water, they moved South eight years ago and opened Pizzuti’s a few blocks from the beach.

Feeding the Hungry
In her youth, Gloria’s father imparted to her and her siblings more than mere technique and business acumen. If a person came in hungry, he told them, it was their obligation as members of a chosen profession to feed them. Occasionally, a customer would come into their New Jersey restaurant and order food without the money to pay for it. Remembering her father’s words, Gloria would feed them anyway.

Telling the story, she grows wistful, somber even, for a moment. It never lasts long. Not wanting potential freeloaders to get the wrong idea, Francesco cracks, “But don’t put that in the magazine,” and laughter erupts as the room’s characteristic lightheartedness is restored.

The exchange is a window into their mirthful relationship. The Pizzutis often speak to each other in a sort of Italian shorthand, condensing entire sentences into a few words, Gloria says. Waitress Kelly Crossett, a 25-year-old native of upstate New York who has worked for the couple for five years and calls herself “the daughter that they adopted,” has the requisite sense of humor to keep up. “They have a pretty humorous relationship,” she says. “I guess if they ever get in a tiff, it’s always in Italian so nobody knows what’s going on.”

The Pizzutis, who usually work late into the night, like to wind down with quiet walks on the beach as the moon shimmers off the water. Gloria grew up around Coney Island, where she would accompany her grandfather as they got mussels off the jetties and took them home for dinner.

Now she does all the cooking at home because Francesco does it for a living. As they do at the restaurant, visitors frequently drop by unannounced and find themselves welcome. “Sometimes it’s right around dinner time,” Gloria says, laughing. “But it’s always nice.”

The laughter trails off and Francesco, standing, looks down at his wife of nearly 25 years, sitting at a table before the dinner crowd rushes in.

“We do have a good time,” he says.

She looks up and responds, “We have a great time.”