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Last October, Peter and Janice Carini signed a six-month contract with a local realtor and put their restaurant up for sale. As the news spread, it sent up a cry of mourning across the city. What would happen? Were they closing? Customers wanted to know.
Founded in 1996, Carini’s La Conca D’Oro, 3468 N. Oakland Ave., has been a family-owned neighborhood staple for 27 years.
The decision to put the restaurant up for sale, Janice says, was multi-faceted. Getting the restaurant through the pandemic was difficult, but the staff shortage which followed was even worse.
“We’ve both been in this industry for a long time,” she says. “And we’re tired. Currently, we’re both working harder than ever because we can’t find enough help. It’s really frustrating to be unable to offer people the level of hospitality for which we’ve become known; and it’s really unfortunate that a business’s success can be entirely dependent upon employees.”
“So, when our son, Gregg, who has worked for the past 9 years as our pizzaiolo, decided to leave the restaurant, we panicked. We had no one to take his place, and we knew we’d have to pull pizza off the menu. Ultimately, we decided to put the restaurant up for sale. We wanted to go out while we were still strong and before everything just fell apart.”
When the news of the potential sale began to spread, customers began to express their concerns to the Carini family.
“There was a huge outpouring of frustration from our customers,” says Janice. “A lot of people really care about this place.”
As the weeks passed, the Carinis got a call from Luis Limon, a former employee who had been trained by Gregg to make their Neapolitan style pies. He offered to come back and take over the pizza station at the restaurant. And, although the Carinis were still shorthanded in the kitchen, they began to rethink their plans.
“Slowly we began to realize that we’d made a mistake putting the restaurant up for sale,” says Jan. “Even though Peter is tired, running a restaurant kitchen is in his blood. It’s what he has worked for his entire life and he began to feel like selling was giving up on his dream.”
As a result, they called their realtor earlier this week and canceled their listing agreement.
Looking back
Peter Carini was just 14 years old when his family moved to the U.S. from Sicily. At 17, he began working in the restaurant industry. At 21, he married Janice, who supported him as he spent 20 years cooking for other businesses.
When he decided he’d rather channel his passion and knowledge of Sicilian cooking into his own restaurant, the couple began looking for a location to start a restaurant.
In 1996, they signed a lease on the space on Oakland Avenue which had been a two-year home for Casablanca, the restaurant which would eventually build a long-term home on Brady Street.
Everyone in the family pitched in. Janice managed front-of-house operations. Gregg worked in the kitchen, eventually spearheading the restaurant’s Neapolitan pizza program. Their daughter Lisa helped out at the restaurant for at least a decade. Meanwhile, their youngest son PJ, who was just 11 years old when they opened, helped out by bussing tables.
“I watched the bartenders make drinks,” he says. “I watched them cooking in the kitchen. I watched the servers dealing with customers. And since then, I’ve done nearly every job in the restaurant.”
Peter says they opened the restaurant on a shoestring budget. “The first five years were tough. But we’ve always made our food from scratch, preparing it fresh, and our customers noticed that. It’s what has kept them coming back."
Their inaugural menu emphasized the seafood which is so readily available in Sicily, serving delicacies like octopus and head-on shrimp (an offering which hadn’t yet caught on in the Midwest and which took most 90s diners by surprise, and not always in a good way).
By and by, the restaurant became popular for pasta dishes like their namesake conca d’oro featuring shrimp, mussels, clams and calamari in a marinara wine sauce; and Peter’s housemade vodka sauce which is still among the restaurant’s top sellers.
Today, pasta still rules alongside Peter's tender rack of lamb and Sicilian spiedini, which is still painstakingly made by hand in the restaurant’s tiny kitchen.
The family started out leasing the space. But in 2001, they bought the building. From there, they remodeled the entire space, section by section. First, they tackled the dining room and then the bar.
When they hired a painter to paint murals of Peter’s hometown of Porticello, Sicily, on the walls in the restaurant, the artist recreated scenes of the island coasts (c.1965), integrating members of the Carini family into the scenes, some depicted with a jolly sense of humor.
In one mural, guests will find PJ and Gregg swimming away from their grandfather’s boat, The Disco Vilante.
On the opposite wall, they’ll find a depiction of Janice sunning herself on the coastal rocks.
In yet another mural, Lisa can be seen peering from a window at the fishing boats along the coast. Meanwhile, Peter can be found running uphill with a stubborn prickly pear stuck to his behind.
Forging ahead
Many things remain the same at Carini’s, including their friendly service and traditional scratch-made Sicilian fare. That’s the way they like it, notes Janice, who says Carini’s has never aspired to transform into more modern concept.
“We enjoy giving people a taste of the old world,” she says. “That’s what we built our restaurant on and what we’ll continue to do.”
At the same time, she says, they are also making updates in the anticipation of being around for at least five more years.
This week, they installed a new POS system and, moving forward they’ll be replacing some of their worn dining room tables and installing new doors in their front “patio” rooms, which open out onto the sidewalk offering diners an open air dining experience when the weather allows.
Guests who visit on Saturdays will find Lisa Carini tending bar most Saturday evenings. After years of missing the bustle of work at the family restaurant, she returned on a limited basis last year to help her parents out. Ask her nicely and she might pour you a glass of her father’s housemade limoncello or blood orangecello.
Ultimately, Jan says, the Carinis would like to rebuild their staff sufficiently enough that they can back away from operations a bit, taking time to travel, relax and enjoy themselves a bit more.
In the meantime, Janice says, loyal customers are the fuel that keeps Carini’s going.
“When people dine here regularly, they become family,” she says. “We know them and they know us. It’s really special. And those are the people that we get up and go to work for every day.”
Carini’s is open Wednesday and Thursday from 3 to 8 p.m.; Friday through Saturday from 3 to 9 p.m.; and Sunday from 3 to 8 p.m.
Lori is an avid cook whose accrual of condiments and spices is rivaled only by her cookbook collection. Her passion for the culinary industry was birthed while balancing A&W root beer mugs as a teenage carhop, fed by insatiable curiosity and fueled by the people whose stories entwine with each and every dish. She’s had the privilege of chronicling these tales via numerous media, including OnMilwaukee and in her book “Milwaukee Food.” Her work has garnered journalism awards from entities including the Milwaukee Press Club.
When she’s not eating, photographing food, writing or recording the FoodCrush podcast, you’ll find Lori seeking out adventures with her husband Paul, traveling, cooking, reading, learning, snuggling with her cats and looking for ways to make a difference.
