When it came to building wine list, Vallone had no ego
I wasn’t around yet when Tony Vallone, the young man from Sunnyside then barely out of his teenage years, threw open the doors to his eponymous restaurant in 1965. And I can’t speak with any authority on the state of Houston’s wining-and-dining scene before Vallone launched what became a marvelous 55-year journey to the highest echelons of his profession that ended with his recent passing.
But what I can say with certitude is that nobody played a greater role on what our city has become as a wining-anddining epicenter than Vallone, who was working the floor at Tony’s the night before he died. That would have been Sept. 9, my birthday. If not for the novel coronavirus, I would have likely celebrated there, meaning I could have had the chance to give him one final heartfelt hug.
Truth to tell, Vallone and I didn’t have a long history. In his Post Oak Blvd. heyday, I couldn’t really afford Tony’s, although my big boss over the Houston Post back then, an old-school Canadian epicurean and bon viveur of the first order, insisted upon taking the Post’s editors and columnists there for a multicourse wine dinner in the cellar whenever he passed through town. I came to love Tony’s on Douglas Creighton’s dime.
But I did get to know Vallone after he asked through a mutual friend that I assist him with a Piemontese dinner he was planning for his then-sister restaurant Ciao Bello in 2015. I brought a little street cred to the project because of my nearly two decades of traveling to Barolo country and also because, several years earlier, I had hosted a longtime friend from Alba, Roberta Ceretto, and her husband, Giuseppe Blengetti, for a specially orchestrated Tony’s dinner.
Ceretto’s father, Bruno, and her uncle Marcello had turned their family winery into one of the Piemonte’s most celebrated and, at the time she and Giuseppe traveled to Houston to see the Robertsons (and, OK, also the Menil Collection because Giuseppe, an architect in Milan, had been inspired as a youngster by the Menil’s legendary architect, Renzo Piano), the Ceretto’s 5-year-old Piazza Duomo restaurant in Alba was receiving widespread accolades. In fact, not long after their visit, it was awarded a third Michelin star and has since become a fixture on all the world’s-bestrestaurants lists.
So, indeed, Roberta and Giuseppe understood food and the art of serving same, which meant they had to experience Tony’s. The experience proved to be a splendid one for them. They left with an admittedly unexpected appreciation for what fine dining looked like in Houston, having arrived assuming they would be overserved Tex-Mex, barbecue and chickenfried steaks in clichéd, worn surroundings.
Anyway, what most struck me about Vallone during our dinner-planning sessions was how quickly he owned up to knowing what he didn’t know, and how much he still wanted to learn. For example, he gave me a third-degree grilling on what I thought he needed to do to capture the essence of Piemontese cuisine. And though by then Tony’s featured a majorleague wine list by any measure, he took great delight in talking about what a wine rube he’d been when he originally threw open his doors on Sage, where a corner of the Galleria now sits.
In a column I wrote that ran five years to the day before his death, he spoke of having started with a wine list that fit on a single page and leaned heavily upon such stuff as Mateus Rosé and Lancer’s. When a “French” wine got requested, more often than not it would be the Gallo Hearty Burgundy, which is actually an old-vine zinfandel from … Lodi, Calif. Not that it much mattered because his customers were more inclined to order Jack Daniels or Four Roses on the rocks to accompany Vallone’s impeccably prepared Italian fare.
Vallone, to be sure, proved a quick study. When he moved to the Post Oak location in 1972, the list had grown to 100 bottles and, by 1975, when Tony’s celebrated its 10th anniversary, he had more than 500 wines on offer, including all of the First Growth Bordeaux.
“Nobody in town could touch me,” he said.
And he was barely 30 years old.
Today? Tony’s expansive list isn’t close to being the biggest in town anymore. But Vallone lit a fire that burns ever more brightly, the current novel coronavirus crisis notwithstanding. It’s a shame he couldn’t live to experience the latest new wave of ambitious, winecentric restaurants, from chef Aaron Bludorn’s eponymous spot on Taft to Ostia on Dunlavy to Goodnight Hospitality’s long-delayed March on Westheimer. They’re all separated by that proverbial six degrees from Tony’s. Vallone set the bar for seasonally correct dishes, exemplary service and a dizzying array of wines, then dared his competitors to raise it. Arguably, some did, but many didn’t. But the net gain for Houston from lots of folks trying to answer the challenge should be obvious to all.