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NEW YORK -- Few operators would suggest that a restaurant could survive for long without a menu inside or a sign outside.
But after 65 years, Marchi's, the family-owned restaurant located in midtown Manhattan, still is going strong -- serving the same five-course meal it introduced in 1940 in the same unmarked brownstone on East 31st Street it has occupied since 1930.
This very traditional Italian dining concept got its start soon after Lorenzo and Francesca Marchi immigrated from Italy's Friuli region to New York City in 1930. The couple were serving as superintendents of the brownstone when one of their tenants -- also a Friuli native lamented that he could never find a good meal in the city and asked if he could dine with the Marchis.
The guest paid 50 cents for the meal, and it was from this beginning that Lorenzo and Francesca -- together with their sons Mario, Robert and John and, later, Mario's wife, Christine -- established Marchi's Restaurant.
"In the beginning," said 92-year-old Francesca Marchi, known as "Mamma" to her family, "we went without help for years and years. It was only me, my husband and then Mario, when he was old enough to carry something. We worked and worked and worked."
And over the years the work took many forms. For example, Lorenzo spent 20 years in a quest to perfect his lasagna sauce. "The sauce was a part of Pop's doings in the morning hours," said Lorenzo's eldest son, Mario. "His work on that was really a labor of love." Lorenzo died in 1981, but not before he had passed the secrets of his sauce on...