Ciao and thanks for all the chow, Anthony's

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

By Ben Cannon

Jackson Hole, Wyo--On a warm and breezy Sunday evening, with a glass of Dynamite cabernet in his hand, Tony Wall sauntered around the restaurant he has owned for the last 27 years.

The pony-tailed and mustachioed Wilson resident sat down near the hostess counter in the cocktail area off of the main dining room at Anthony’s Italian Restaurant.

His eyes glancing occasionally toward the door as the evening’s diners came and went, Tony jumped up, offered a bowl of seafood chowder and promptly returned with said soup and a basket of warm, flaky garlic bread.

Ordinarily, Wall would not be hanging out at his restaurant on a Sunday, but for the last few weeks he has made it a point to spend at least a few hours there every night. He wants to be able to say so long to the customers he knows or who know him and his restaurant.

For all except the most committed who might return later in the week, it will be their last meal at Anthony’s, because this Saturday night a restaurant whose aura and mythology (not to mention the very reasonably priced food) could indicate the zeitgeist of another fading era in Jackson Hole, will serve its last meals.

“It is bittersweet, there’s a sadness,” Wall said in his slight upstate New York accent.
Like the final sunset that someday meets all things, sometimes independently owned family restaurants, too, must say goodbye. But for earthling and eatery, it can be a blessing to have the knowledge of the end at hand and the time to say farewell to those who care.

“There are so many old, local customers,” he went on. “They say, ‘Thanks so much.’  People are in tears – it’s really quite touching. If you have to go, it’s a really nice way to go.”

In February 1977, Anthony Paroulo, who has been gone from Jackson Hole for decades now, opened Anthony’s. Wall came on to work in the kitchen shortly thereafter. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Jackson was a much different place than it is now: a smaller town situated in a patently funkier time of Grateful Dead libertinism that became – along with similar American mountain towns (Hunter Thompson’s Aspen, for one) – the freewheeling parallel to Reagan-era conservatism.

“[Anthony’s] was kind of a fun, wild place to work,” said Wall, now 56 and married without children to Anne Corley, who at one time worked at the restaurant. “It seems like everybody used to be what we called ‘longhairs.’

Those were the times when you had a couple of guys scrubbing dishes who had Princeton degrees.”

Anthony Paroulo had neglected to keep up on his taxes, and in May of 1980, the IRS literally walked into Anthony’s and shut down the place. Wall was at work baking bread on that day. But the restaurant was able to reopen later that summer, and in September, Tony bought Anthony’s from Paroulo.

“One of the interesting things about Anthony’s is that people who worked there back in the beginning are still there today,” said Judd Grossman, who was 18 in 1980, when he first came to wash dishes at the restaurant, and who worked there off and on for seven years.

Grossman was known, on occasion, to wear turbans to work and sometimes slept there when he was otherwise homeless, though he had to sneak out again before the early shift arrived.

In fact, current employees (servers and kitchen staff alike) Lynn Hammond, Jan Marie Hobart, Shelley Rubrecht, Stan Wood, Greg Marin, Pete Wiswell, Brian Rutter, Mike Mason and Diana Stratton – who retired in the last year – have over 170 years of combined experience at Anthony’s. And there arev others who have been there nearly as long as those old timers.

If the early ’80s resembled at all the fun-loving, ne’er-do-well spirit of the movie “Caddyshack,” then Anthony’s carried on that tradition of a laissez-faire attitude, staff familiarity, purposely ignoring the more gentrified trends that Jackson’s ruling bourgeois seem to prefer more each day.

Anthony’s is one of the last restaurants of its type without a computerized interface between servers and kitchen. Employees are allowed to eat anything off the menu at anytime. And a regulated intake of alcohol is permissible.

“The long-standing joke was that the guys in the kitchen have always been allowed to drink and not fall down; the guys in the dish room could fall down but had to get up on their own power,” Wall said half-seriously.

Pete Wiswell has been Anthony’s kitchen manager for 24 years. Now married with kids, Wiswell came at a time when a restaurant worker could buy a plot of land somewhere in the valley and build a home, as he did.

“If a kid comes here now, there’s no chance of carving out a niche for yourself,” said Wiswell, who often wears flip-flops to work, an idea verboten in probably all of Jackson Hole’s swankier establishments.

Wiswell is amiable and, even more so than Wall, he wears an accent colored by his native land: an area of Massachusetts north of Boston.  

“We’ve been emotional” about closing, Wiswell said as he began his routine of preparing the kitchen for  Monday night’s dinner. “It’s not just the uncertainty of what’s next … but that the unit we’ve been will be broken up and cease to exist.”

Wall owns the space Anthony’s occupies, a storefront piecemealed over the years from a few old businesses now mostly forgotten. The real estate has become much more valuable than running a restaurant that has long embraced large portions with the hearty, wallet-friendly inclusions of soup, salad and garlic bread when bill-padding dishes ordered a la carte have become the norm.

“I’ve grown weary of the restaurant business over the last few years,” said Wall, who is undecided about his next venture and will lease out the Anthony’s space to the Muse Gallery and some other tenants yet unnamed. He tells everyone who asks that he hopes to “become an astronaut.”

On Sunday evening, Max and Helen Kudar, a retired couple who have frequented Anthony’s for nearly 30 years, shared the same side of a table facing the rest of the comfortable, unpretentious dining room.

A candle they brought from home burned in front of them – a throwback to when Anthony’s used to provide the candlelight.

“It breaks my heart that there is an icon that’s leaving,” Helen Kudar said.
Anthony’s is still accepting reservations for the rest of the week, including the grand finale on Saturday.

“It’s going to be a parade of past customers and employees,” Pete Wiswell said. “It will be the last hoorah.”

Courtesy photo taken at Anthony's in 1995.

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Ciao and thanks for all the chow, Anthony's | Planet JH News Article: Restaurants And Dining

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