Chapter 1: A Decision Made Over Garlic Shrimp

How one moment can reverberate through time.

Our story begins in 1986 over plates of garlic shrimp and gin and tonics in Monessen, Pennsylvania. Lucchesi’s restaurant, a one room, hole in the wall haunt with a kitchen so small that the owner/chef is the only one allowed to cook. A white tablecloth Italian that has had the exact same menu for sixty years. A bit of Mon Valley class just across the street from the burning smokestacks of The Wheeling-Pittsburgh steel mill.

Unlike the trend of speakeasy-like restaurants that have become so popular these days, Lucchesi’s was always the real thing. Hidden in plain sight with a front door so ordinary that if you don’t know how to find it, you won’t.

Rumors like the Penguins hockey team renting a limo to get themselves to Lucchesi’s all the way from Pittsburgh in the 1990’s are the stuff of legend.

My parents would order the lobster on Friday nights, back when they had no money, a fact that made their parents grimace and mutter, if those kids keep spending their money like they have it,…