In 1953 John Antolotti opened a 60-seat Italian restaurant on East 49th Street in Manhattan, between First and Second Avenues. He worked the front of the house, greeting customers, taking reservations, and so forth; his wife, Mae, and his brother teamed up in the kitchen to turn out a variety of traditional family dishes from northern Italy, from veal breast with spinach stuffing to home-made rum cake.
Antolotti’s Restaurant did well from virtually the moment it opened its doors, and business boomed even more after Parade magazine, in the summer of 1957, featured Mae Antolotti’s recipe for Torta di Parma—which it described as “a delicious blend of chopped vegetables, cheese, and rice, baked in a special pastry”—as a perfect dish for American picnics.
Antolotti’s had its share of famous patrons, but none more loyal than Truman Capote, the novelist, short story writer, and literary celebrity. Capote lived just a block away on First Avenue, and for more than 20 years he was a regular fixture at Antolotti’s, always sitting in the same banquette along the restaurant’s east wall, directly across from the bar. A favorite dinner was minestrone, linguine with lobster sauce, and zabaglione with fresh strawberries. “He was a part of the family,” Joe Piscina, Antolotti’s bartender (and John and Mae’s son-in-law), told the New York Times a few weeks after Capote’s death in 1984. “He was here almost every day for lunch or dinner. He came here with Gina Lollobrigida, with Lee Radziwell, with lots of people. Everyone knew him. If he wasn’t here, they’d say, ‘Where’s Truman tonight?’ “
By the mid-1980s Louis “Sonny” Antolotti, John and Mae’s son, was running the running the restaurant, and its walls were decorated with autographed photos of the owners with celebrity patrons and pictures of thoroughbred horses the family bred had raised at its farm in upstate New York. Service was still intensely personal—just as it was in the early days. The menus that each waiter handed guests said, “If you don’t see what you want, tell me and the chef will prepare it.”
In 1989, when he was in his mid-50s, Louis Antolotti stepped on his bathroom scale one day and saw that he weighed 272 pounds, even though he stood just 5 feet 9 1/2 inches tall. Hitting the panic button, he decided to check himself into the Pritikin Longevity Center in Santa Monica, California, for a four-week stay. “I couldn’t stop eating,” he explained to a reporter for Newsday. “I was drinking too much. It was one of those moments when I realized that if I didn’t change my ways, I would be a goner. I was a walking time bomb.” He lost 27 pounds at the center and another 19 after he got home, said goodbye to his blood-pressure pills, and started running on a treadmill every night. He even added some fat-free dishes from the Pritikin diet to the menu at Antolotti’s restaurant.
John Antolotti died in 1990, and the next few years were rough ones for the restaurant he’d founded nearly four decades earlier. In 1993 came an especially caustic review in the Daily News. “Certainly,” the newspaper’s restaurant critic wrote, “the place is no longer frequented by the many long-gone celebrities whose faded pictures adorn the entrance.”
A little more than a year later, Antolotti’s unceremoniously closed. Mae Antolotti died in 2002, and Louis Antolotti died at in 2006 at age 73 from injuries sustained in a motor vehicle accident.
Two other Italian restaurants would follow Antolotti’s at 337 East 49th: Mimosa, for a short run beginning in 1995, and then Il Postino, which opened there in January 1997.
Here’s the recipe for one of the signature dishes at Antolotti’s, as it was prepared in the 1970s: the eponymous, and delicious, Shrimp Antolotti.
