Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
The keys to life
After café closes, Piano Lady of Las Olas plays on
For nearly 30 years, Patrician Zanghi has dazzled audiences along Las Olas Boulevard with her piano-playing prowess.
Patrons were known to stop by the former Café de Paris in Fort Lauderdale and sit around the piano as Zanghi performed standards, jazz and classics, everything from “rock to Bach,” as she described it.
After the 50-year-old French restaurant closed last year, “people were calling me, asking where I was playing,” said Zanghi. “I’ve got a big following, you know.”
These days, the energetic 73-year-old can still be found tickling the ivories in Fort Lauderdale — at Riverside Hotel on Saturday nights and Serafina Trattoria Italiana on Sunday evenings.
And her fans from Café de Paris have followed her there.
“This woman is just magnificent,” said Brian Mason, a Fort Lauderdale flight attendant and professional opera singer. “She has brought so much happiness to us
with her piano-playing over the years. This is a woman who loves life. She sparkles, and the people get so much joy from watching her play.”
She learned to play the piano at age 7 from her father, concert pianist Anthony Zanghi.
“I never wanted to practice, like most kids,” she recalled, of her youth just outside Providence.
“I practiced four to five hours a day. My mother locked me in a room and it paid off,” she added, with a smile.
She went on to study classical music at the former Chaloff School of Music in Boston. She married, had a daughter and eventually divorced. By the late 1970s, looking to support herself, she began teaching piano privately in her hometown.
Like her father, who also had been a fixture as a cocktail pianist at Rhode Island restaurants and clubs for decades, she began playing gigs in Providence and Newport, in venues from hotels to mansions to an excursion ship.
She performed recitals with him at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Playing with her father on dueling pianos was “better than going out on a date,” she said. “It really was. It was a thrill. It was exhilarating.’’
“The greatest compliment that I got was from an opera singer in Rhode Island, whom my father played for. She saw me and said, ‘You sound just like your father.’ ”
After a rough blizzard in 1989, Zanghi decided to pack up and move to South Florida for the warmer weather. She brought along her parents, who were becoming elderly.
“From the day I came out here, I always worked,” said Zanghi, sitting at one of two pianos in her Oakland Park home, her fingers furiously waltzing over the keys. “I’ll work until I can’t anymore. I do enjoy it. It gives you life. Right now, I am playing better than ever.”
Her longest-running gig was at the Café de Paris, where she started in 1990 “on a handshake” for $75 a night, five days a week from 7:30 to 11:30 p.m. For a time, she also played at the restaurant’s sister establishment, the French Quarter.
“I would play the cocktail hour from 5 to 7 p.m., and then I would run across the street and play at Café de Paris,” she said.
She took a sabbatical from playing locally after her mother, Pasqualine, passed away in 1999. She lost her father a year later and then her 16-year-old labrador chow, Shiba (who also liked to play the piano, Zanghi said).
“She would get up on the piano and go up and down. Everybody in my house played the piano,’’ said Zanghi, with a big laugh. “[But then] everyone had passed away. I was very sad.”
In 2005, Zanghi decided she needed a change of scenery. She landed a contract playing for a Holland America cruise line for six months.
“I thought it would be a nice thing for me to travel and still play the piano,” said Zanghi, who performed in the mornings, lunchtime and evenings, seven days a week on her assigned ship.
While she was able to travel to places like Alaska, Canada and Mexico and enjoyed bantering with passengers, she said, “I felt lonely, very lonely. I came back when my contract was done.”
She eventually made her way back home to the Café de Paris again.
“It was always home for me,” said Zanghi, who played there until owner Louis Flematti closed the restaurant in May 2016.
On a recent Thursday afternoon, as she played some of her favorites from musicals “Les Miserables” and “The Phantom of the Opera” on her black Baldwin piano at home, Zanghi was invigorated, talking about her daily jogs and swims. She said they help her maintain her stamina for hours of piano-playing.
“I have so much energy,” she said. “I’m a very dramatic pianist. I play drama. It puts people in a good mood. Basically, I’m having fun, Music is my life. I do it day and night.”
And when she’s not performing in public, she gives private piano lessons six days a week. Her students are mostly men in their 40s, she said, with some in their 80s.
“It goes to show you, it’s never too late. You can still learn,” Zanghi said.
At Serafina, she plays a Yamaha grand digital piano, and keeps with her a tip jar and some of her self-released CDs, including one of a live performance with her father in Newport.
“She does a great job,” said restaurant co-owner Mickey Annecca, who had heard her play at Café de Paris. “I liked her music. She has all kinds of songs. She sings.”
And she interacts with her audiences, inviting them to sing along.
“I start off with ballads, and I do play all requests,” she said. “I don’t do Lady Gaga … but I might one day.”