From the magazine spread, photo by Greg Harris.
BY VANESSA CARR
Originally published in the Spring 2009 issue of 65 Degree Magazine.
It’s lunchtime and raining in downtown San Francisco, yet the white-clothed outdoor tables of Belden Place are filling quickly. With eight restaurants crowded beneath strings of lights and taut red awnings, this small alley feels more old-town Italy than Financial District hustle.
Like in any small town, there’s one man on Belden Place whom everyone seems to know: Pino Spinoso. He can’t walk two paces without shouting a greeting in English or Italian. And it’s no wonder—Spinoso owns three of the alley’s restaurants: Café Tiramisu, Brindisi Cucina di Mare, and Belden Taverna.
Spinoso is the classic Italian restaurateur: gregarious, dark-suited, broad, raised in kitchens, a wine lover. According to Spinoso, his staff are “friends,” he’s a “leader—not a boss,” and a 16-hour day is “a short one.”
“It’s hard work, but the party comes to you,” he says.
Just shy of 50, Spinoso grew up in Venosa, a land-locked town located on the ankle of Italy’s proverbial boot. With two parents in the restaurant business, he and his siblings grew up “with the culture of food and wine in their blood and DNA.”
But forget any romantic idea of sipping sauce from Grandma’s wooden spoon: Spinoso learned to cook working long hours alongside his parents in the family restaurant.
“They put a chain on me in the kitchen,” he jokes.
At 12, his family immigrated to Düsseldorf, Germany, where he encountered the truly wealthy for the first time in the restaurants where he cooked. Spinoso cultivated his culinary talent through his teenage years, and before long patrons started returning for his creations, specifically. By 18, he had started his own restaurant in partnership with an uncle.
Despite these early successes, Spinoso started to feel like a prisoner in Düsseldorf: “I’m going to die in this kitchen here,” he thought to himself.
His first step toward freedom, paradoxically, was reporting for mandatory military service in Italy as a paratrooper. For his last six months, he was stationed in North Carolina.
“That is where I fell in love with the American way of doing things,” Pino said.
After the military, Spinoso started working on cruise ships—as chef, bell captain, whatever was offered. For the next seven years, he traveled the world by sea—the Suez Canal, South Africa, New Zealand, the Black Sea—before returning to the U.S.
It was in San Francisco that Spinoso opened his first U.S. restaurant, Caffè Macaroni, a 13-seater “the size of a shoebox.” There he cooked an unconventional menu featuring horse meat and rabbit, rode his scooter daily to the market for fresh produce, and eventually hosted guests like Francis Ford Coppola, George H. W. Bush, and Pat Conroy.
Today Spinoso owns six restaurants; four in San Francisco and one in both Burlingame and Bangkok, Thailand. He lives in San Francisco with his wife of 20 years, Joelle—originally from the Monterey Bay Area—and his 13-year old daughter, Allegra.
Watching Spinoso greet champagne-sipping businessmen during lunch, it’s hard to imagine that just twenty years ago the alley was full of garbage and car parts, and was still open to traffic. He dragged the first table into the street on Café Tiramisu’s opening day in 1990 because the alley’s brick walls and quality of light reminded him of Rome. But the likeness between the two cities is greater than brick and light.
“An old Italian man once told me, ‘San Francisco is just like Italy,’” Spinoso recounts. “‘You throw a seed in the floor and it will grow—you don’t have to do anything. The seafood, the vegetables, the meat—no other city in the U.S. has done so well as San Francisco.”
