In 1973, a 21-year-old Jerry Carbone agreed to run his father’s small pizza shop after the manager was shown the door.
Carbone quickly turned around the shop, which was at Smith Avenue and Curtice Street on St. Paul’s West Side. But he had worked long hours — every day.
“It started making a profit,” Jerry recalled this week. “And then my dad found out I quit school. I said, ‘How am I supposed to work seven days a week and go to school?’ ”
So his dad, Mario Carbone, offered to sell him the small shop for what he had put into it — $10,000.
“I jumped at it,” he said.
Carbone would go on to own and operate a Carbone’s Pizzeria for the next 46 years.
Those days are now done. In April, he sold his West St. Paul pizza joint, which he built in 1980 along Wentworth Avenue just west of South Robert Street, to restaurateur Pat Weinberg, who has owned Purple Onion Cafe in Minneapolis’ Dinkytown neighborhood since 1993.
Carbone’s wife, Joan, said she can already see the difference in him.
“He’s so much calmer, relaxed,” she said.
Carbone worked his last day on the job on Friday. Family, friends and current and former employees are throwing him a retirement party from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at the restaurant.
“He didn’t want us to do anything special for him,” Joan said Thursday at the restaurant, where she worked as a server the past 22 years. “But then he agreed to it if we had it here.”
Since the sale, Carbone has been working part time at the restaurant showing Weinberg’s son-in-law, Eddie Castro, how to run the business. But that’s been tough on Carbone, who has had a hard time releasing his tight grip, his wife said.
“He has his own way of doing things,” she said.
But Castro said the transition, which Weinberg asked Carbone to do, has made it easier on longtime customers and staff. Besides Carbone being gone, don’t expect big changes, Castro said.
“We just want to build on the legacy that he has left,” he said.
‘AN INSTANT SUCCESS’
Framed black and white pictures of the family’s nearly century of being small business owners adorn a hallway at the restaurant.
Among Carbone’s favorites is one of his grandparents, Alfonso and Antoinette, in their small Italian grocery store and deli they opened on St. Paul’s East Side in 1926.
“When grandpa died the boys came and helped her,” Carbone said, referring to his father and his uncle Frankie. “She’d do the cooking in the back and they’d sell 3.2 beer in the front.”
Carbone said everything changed when a cousin called from Chicago and introduced them to pizza in 1954.
“They went out there and he showed them how to make a pizza,” Carbone said. “He charged them $5,000 for the recipe. The two boys brought it back and started making pizza … and it was an instant success.”
They made pizzas in the front of the original restaurant at East Seventh Street and Maria Avenue, while Antoinette, also known as “Nana,” cooked spaghetti and sauce and meatballs in the back.
“So eventually they tore the bar out, because the pizza was going over so good,” he said.
Yarusso Brothers, a restaurant right around the corner, also sold pizza to the neighborhood, which was heavily populated with Italian immigrants.
“It was brand-spanking new,” Carbone said of pizza.
Carbone started making pizzas at the restaurant as a high-schooler, working alongside his older brothers, Tom and Dick, who were managers.
“That’s where I cut my teeth, so to speak,” he said.
Carbone and Dick opened up a West St. Paul location in 1974 along South Robert Street, before moving to Wentworth Avenue six years later. The brothers also had locations in Shoreview and Stillwater; they’ve since sold them off.
Their brother, Tom, was the franchise owner, and also ran the original East Side restaurant. In Minnesota, there are now 37 Carbone’s Pizzerias, mostly in the metro area.
Tom died in 2017, but his son, Tom Jr., still runs the East Side restaurant.
FRESH DOUGH TO START
Carbone has had to add on or remodel the West St. Paul restaurant three times over the years.
“West St. Paul has been really good to me,” he said.
Dave Krause, who has been a manager at the restaurant since 1983, said Carbone’s success came because of hard work.
“I’ve never seen anyone work as much as he did — making pizzas, tending bar,” Krause said. “He did everything, and kept things running. And it was either his way or the highway.”
Carbone said his days always started with making fresh dough.
“Right after I walked in the door,” he said. “Six days a week.”
It’s time to hang up his black apron, he said.
“I’m tired. I want to take this apron and give it to Eddie,” he said. “He can build his own legacy.”
