eat + drink

We were barely inside the door, and Mike Yarusso welcomed us as if we were part of the family. Considering how far back my family and his goes on St. Paul’s East Side, we might be.

“Not bad for a little hole-in-the-wall spaghetti place, huh?” he asked as we looked around at the new façade.

“Or it was a little hole-in-the-wall spaghetti place,” he added.
Shuttered since February by a fire that drew a few murmured comparisons to the torched restaurant on “The Sopranos,” Yarusso Bros. disproved those scurrilous rumors by reopening three weeks ago — newly dressed up in fancier digs, no less.
Score one for St. Paul. And for coronary disease.

In this day and age, where businesses get squashed into strip malls like MNDot filling in potholes, we need to cling to these old dives — er, fine-dining establishments. They remind some of us of our roots. They remind all of us of nothing in any other city in America.

Opened in 1933 along Hold Steady singer Craig Finn’s favorite St. Paul street, Payne Avenue, Yarusso’s  sits in the heart of Swede Hollow, sort of the Ellis Island of St. Paul.

The area played host to all the different waves of immigrants, including the Swedes and the Italians. The Mexican restaurant that now neighbors Yarusso’s — which I hear is also pretty terrific — suggests that legacy lives on.

A large painting of turn-of-the-century Swede Hollow is one of the things that survived the fire at Yarusso’s. So did the original wood bar, built for the restaurant by the Hamm’s Brewery, which overlooked the neighborhood. Hamm’s basically just had to kick its kegs out the back door and let them roll downhill into Yarusso’s front door.

The menu and greasy-spoon Italian flavor also survived the fire. The kitchen where the fire started was even expanded in the remodeling.

“We have a bigger heart now,” Mike Yarusso cracked.

Where to start on the food …

It’s the kind of place that offers a “meatball dinner,” not to be confused with the spaghetti-and-meatball option. The kind of place that sells a $2 Dago, a regular Dago and the Dago Supreme, but the menu doesn’t once tell you what a Dago is. The kind of place where the pepperoni nearly outnumbers the pieces of lettuce in the antipasto salad. The kind of place where the “Dinner for Two” serving of baked mostaccioli means “two days’ worth of leftovers.”

Here’s the best thing I can say about the meal we had: You know it’s good when my 23-month-old daughter and my 66-year-old dad both shut up once the food arrives.
My first visit back to the restaurant last week was as heart-tugging as it was heart-burning.

As my dad reminded me while we waited for our table (the crowd was out the door on a Thursday night), there’s not a lot left of the old East Side where I grew up.

The Hamm’s Brewery — which my friend Mark and I toured when were 12 or 13, seriously thinking we’d get free Stroh’s beer at the end — is awaiting either a final wrecking ball or, worse, a condo redo.

The old St. John’s Hospital, where allegedly one literary giant, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and at least one literary pipsqueak (me) entered the world, was long ago toppled. And the big 3M plant up the hill from Yarusso’s was shuttered a few years back, coincidentally or not when some union scuttlebutt was going on there.

Also gone: My grandpa Floyd, who worked at that 3M plant, and my great uncle Jack Redlund, who worked at the brewery. Both those guys held down their jobs longer than I could ever imagine working somewhere. But those were the days when people stayed in one place. Geez, I’m sounding like Carole King.

What does all this have to do with Yarusso’s? Everything, for me. That restaurant is about the only thing left to pull me over to that part of the East Side from my new digs in south Minneapolis — which I love but, let’s face it, there weren’t any immigrant shantytowns or breweries along Minnehaha Creek.

Am I writing about Yarusso’s to boost its business now that it’s open again? You bet. But I’m doing it more for my family than the Yarussos.