After an 80-year run, Carbone’s is closing
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Days are numbered for an Italian-American feast at a white-tablecloth, sit-down family restaurant born of a bygone era: Carbone’s Restaurant in Crabtree announced it will close July 28 after an 80-year run.
Owner Natalie Carbone Mangini says that no other family member wanted to take on the family business.
“The main reason for our decision centers on family, of course,” she wrote on Facebook over the weekend. “Operating a large restaurant is an enormous task. For some members of our family, they have never known anything but the restaurant, and the majority of their lives have revolved around it.
“Any job can take a toll on someone, but when that is compounded with health issues, and the fact that there isn’t a younger family member desiring to take over operations, we felt that the only decision was to close.”
The announcement on the restaurant’s website, which includes a video, explained that Ms. Carbone Mangini’s parents, Nat Jr. and Mary Carbone, opened the Westmoreland County destination in 1938 in what had been a social hall with a pool hall, a barber shop, a candy store and, eventually, a 10-room apartment on the upper level where the family lived.
By 1973, Ms. Carbone Mangini’s father moved the restaurant to a new location that was 12,000 square feet and seated 600 diners — apparently, one of the largest in Western Pennsylvania.
The restaurant claims many firsts. It was first in the area to serve Rolling Rock on draft and the first restaurant in the area with a stone hearth oven — to serve pizza, then called Italian tomato pie. It also claims to have been the first restaurant to install a microwave oven, then called a Raytheon Radar Range, and so on.
Over the decades, the restaurant has hired nearly 2.000 employees and served more than 2 million customers, Ms. Carbone Mangini says.
“When there’s a full house, which is not unusual, Carbone’s has more people than the municipality in which it is located — especially since much of the population of Crabtree, near Greensburg, is employed there,” reads the 1977 review in The Pittsburgh Press.
The three-starred review gave shoutouts to lasagna — “so full of filling the pasta was difficult to find” — eggplant parm — “out of this world” — and braciole — “sheets of beefsteak, separated with mushrooms and rolled into a cylinder,” served in a rich tomato sauce. Of course, there was house Chianti, although “a fine Lambrusco [was] served valiantly by the bottle.”
Ms. Carbone Mangini wasn’t just a restaurant-family scion: After graduating from Seton Hill College (now University) in Greensburg, she became a nuclear chemist and was the first woman scientist at the Westinghouse Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, starting in 1951. There, she worked on the reactor for the USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear submarine.
After a decade working for Westinghouse, following her marriage to Vincent Mangini in 1957, she left to take care of her four children and to help out with the family restaurant, in part, because she had to: