'People still have to eat.' Carryout carries Lansing mainstay DeLuca's, Detroit Frankie's through coronavirus

The path to surviving a pandemic can look different for two independent restaurants in Greater Lansing, even if they both make a living slinging pizza.

The doors hadn’t opened yet at Detroit Frankie's Wood Fired Brick Oven in mid-March when Gov. Gretchen Whitmer banned dine-in service at restaurants in Michigan.

The 36-seat eatery in a plaza off Migaldi Lane, just a few storefronts away from The Tin Can Bar, opened March 17, less than a day after the dine-in ban was put in place. Staff have been in masks and gloves serving up pizza curbside to customers waiting inside their vehicles out front ever since.

“We’ve got a nice little system for putting out a wood-fired pizza,” owner Frank Tignanelli said.

Still, it wasn't what he had in mind before he opened.

“I pictured a busy, fun place. Now, with the quarantine, there’s no contact. Not one paying customer has eaten in here.”

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Less than 6 miles away DeLuca's Restaurant is finding its rhythm again after a month-long closure. The 60-year mainstay in the capital city, a family business with a loyal following, has weathered more than one economic recession, and expanded twice since opening in 1960, but it had never closed for any extended length of time before the coronavirus.

The restaurant hasn't faced a hardship comparable to the pandemic, said John DeLuca, the restaurant’s vice president, and his family opted for caution when the coronavirus arrived in Lansing.

“We didn’t want to be responsible for people getting sick, our employees or customers, so we made that decision to wait, and find out what was going to happen,” he said.

DeLuca’s reopened April 27, after the number of COVID-19 cases reported by the state began to level off. Customers showed up, standing outside the restaurant and waiting their turn to go inside and pick up an order in the week that followed.

Carryout is carrying both restaurants through an unprecedented time.

Weathering the storm means adapting, not stopping, Tignanelli said.

"Every fast food place everywhere was open, and the little guy, they had to reinvent themselves," he said. 

After a month-long closure, DeLuca's opens

Leaving a restaurant to sit idle comes at a cost, John DeLuca, 68, said.

“The building’s expensive just to sit there,” he said. “The taxes don’t go away. Machinery, it sits there, and it will go bad sitting there faster than if it’s being used. All those things, of course you’ve got to worry about them.”

Before restaurants had to stop serving customers at their tables, nearly 60 people worked at DeLuca's Restaurant. It closed March 24.

Today about 20 employees are back on the job, mixing dough, shredding cheese, and topping and baking pizzas in the eatery's large bakery-style oven.

DeLuca's pizza is a Lansing favorite, known for its house-made sauce on a buttery crust, covered with generous toppings and lots of cheese.

That recipe evolved over years of listening to customer requests. It started with John DeLuca's father, Pasquale "Pat" DeLuca, who immigrated to the U.S. from southern Italy in the late 1930s.

He arrived in Durand by train, and spent his first night in Michigan sleeping in a ditch after the person he thought was picking him up didn't. 

"He had the equivalent of 35 cents in lire in his pocket," John DeLuca said. "That was it, the clothes on his back and 35 cents.”

Pat DeLuca was "tough," son Chuck DeLuca, 72, said.

By the time he bought the empty building at 2006 W. Willow St., Pat DeLuca was married to his wife, Helen, and they had a family. He and another family member opened the Willow Bar at the property, a neighborhood gathering spot frequented by Lansing's automotive workers.

Both Chuck and John DeLuca grew up working there, mopping the mint green floor and working alongside their father in the kitchen.

"It was a shop bar, you know, for the GM factories," John DeLuca said. "The menu was fairly simple, hamburgers, French fries."

But pizza quickly became a customer favorite, in part, because Pat DeLuca "used his head," continually improving the recipe he started with, John DeLuca said. 

"You know what he did? He just listened to the customers and he’d adjust the ingredients and the sauce by customer comments. It’s just so different than what you get anywhere else. I have to say the biggest thing is the crust and sauce. We make all of that stuff every day."

The pizza brought local families to the bar and, in the late 1970's, the eatery got a family-friendly name, becoming DeLuca's Restaurant. 

Pat DeLuca died two decades ago, just shy of his 80th birthday. The family business is still a Lansing institution.

"The place has been so good to us, the customers just wonderful,” John DeLuca said. "I try to never take it for granted. A lot of times I just look at it when I’m leaving at night and I think, I can’t believe this."

In late April, when it opened after the month-long closure, the DeLuca family greeted a line of customers standing out front waiting to pick up their orders.

"They were out the door, down the parking lot and out to the sidewalk," John DeLuca said. "I just couldn’t believe my eyes. I went out there and said, "'Hello customers. Welcome back,' and everybody waved."

Amy Miller's family ordered from DeLuca's that first week, lasagna for her mother and pizza for everyone else. She's been eating at the restaurant for decades.

"It’s a family business and my dad always told us, you should support local businesses," Miller, 52, said. "They have good food. They’re local. It’s not a chain. I think that’s important to people."

The support has made the transition to a carryout-only operation easier for DeLuca's, John DeLuca said. Staff are wearing gloves and masks, and sanitizing work spaces and door handles constantly.

John DeLuca was diagnosed with leukemia three years ago after a tumor was discovered in his optic nerve. He lost his eye, and doesn't have the strength he once did, but says being back at the restaurant "helps me keep my mind off of it."

There are challenges. The restaurant is finding it hard to get yeast, dairy products and meat, John DeLuca said, and customers want food made with all three. He's worried the staff will be forced to adjust the menu if they can't get the ingredients for some of the dishes they make.

"People want their ranch sauce," he said.

He's seen plenty of customer enthusiasm. They're anxious for normalcy, he said, and that's encouraging.

"They’re going to have their hands full keeping people inside when the weather gets better," John DeLuca said. "They’re ready to run."

Detroit Frankie's opens during pandemic

At 3:30 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon last week staff at Detroit Frankie's Wood Fired Brick Oven had already fallen into their daily routine.

The restaurant wasn't scheduled to open for another half hour, but they were already working to fill online orders for pickup placed that afternoon.

Tignanelli, 66, stood behind a counter stretching out a ball of dough draped over his gloved hands. Using his fists, he stretched the dough, turning it over both knuckles. Once it became a 16-inch circle he laid it on top of a wooden peel and slid it down the counter to another employee spreading sauce and toppings on pizza headed for the eatery’s wood-fired oven.

The restaurant’s booths were empty. A computer, credit card machine and telephone were set up on a table in one corner — order central.

Small white slips of paper were lined up and clipped above Tignanelli’s head, each listing the next order. Each slip detailed arrival times and the type of car a customer would be driving so staff knew which order to run out when customers pulled into the parking lot.

“If I could get two or three sides of red sauce that would be amazing. Thank you!,” read the message on one of the slips. Customers are tipping the staff 15% or more on average during the pandemic. They're cooperative and grateful, Tignanelli said.

“You just keep going,” he said, as he kneaded. “People still have to eat."

When Tignanelli opened the eatery, an extension of the food trailer he launched six years ago, online ordering wasn't part of the business plan but it has since made functioning during the pandemic so much easier.

In its first week of business every order at Detroit Frankie's was taken over the phone. Staff had trouble keeping up with the calls, while at the same time managing the number of customers allowed to come inside to pick up pizzas, Tignanelli said.

So Detroit Frankie's closed for a week and Tignanelli used the time to establish an online ordering system through the business website.

“That was kind of new to my world, being a mobile wood-fired pizza guy,” he said.

When they reopened the eatery customers were asked to wait in their vehicles. A runner, usually Tignanelli's wife, Paula, takes the orders outside, handing the pizza to customers through a rolled down window or placing orders in back seats or a trunk.

Dawn Byers of Grand Ledge has ordered from the eatery twice in the last month. She's out of work herself. Her Delta Township business Salon VivEsta, a hair salon, is closed and money is tight but when her family eats out they order from local spots, Byers said.

"They opened during all of this and I didn’t feel like they had a fighting chance in the very beginning so I wanted to support them," she said. "It was excellent. The food was delicious."

Detroit Frankie's functions with a staff of about half a dozen people. Tignanelli plans to bring in more people when state restrictions are eased but for now says they have enough people to do the work.

Thursday of last week a few additional staff were at work for training. Tignanelli wants them to be ready to work when restaurants are given the go-ahead to serve customers inside again.

Tignanelli loves his customers. Their snapshots fill frames hanging on the eatery’s walls – photos taken at Detroit Frankie’s food trailer.

“I think for having a pizza business, carryout works well for that," Paula said. "It’s not ideal. He likes to see people. He likes to have them come in and talk to him. He doesn’t get a chance to do that right now.”

Before he opened the doors in March, Tignanelli most looked forward to seeing their faces, to serving them at the booths inside his new place — it's something he's still looking forward to when he can.

“Whenever everything opens we may have to stagger customers in every other booth," he said. "I don’t know what it will look like, but they gotta let people go out and eat again eventually. It'll happen."

Contact Rachel Greco at rgreco@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @GrecoatLSJ.