New Castle’s new Sunday Sauce Trail follows Italian food culture
“There are some weeks where all I think is, ‘Oh, my goodness,’ ” she admits with a laugh.
Started in 1960 as the women’s auxiliary arm of the Italian social club Duca Degli Abruzzi, the Ladies have been dishing up their Sunday dinners since incorporating as a nonprofit in 1963. First, they did so informally at other social clubs in the area, but have been at their current location in the former Cozy Inn restaurant since 1972.
By 2004, they were so busy they had to remodel the space to expand the kitchen and make room for more than two dozen tables in the dining room.
“We do in a day what some restaurants do in a week,” notes Marino.
Time to make sauce
Thousands of Italian immigrants settled in New Castle during the late 19th and early 20th centuries to work in industries that didn’t require English language skills, such as tin mills, coal mines and limestone quarries in nearby Hillsville, notes Claudia Manly of the Lawrence County Historical Society.
Along with their art and culture, their wives brought with them the tomato-based Neapolitan ragus and red sauces they learned to make from their mothers and grandmothers. Sunday sauce, as the dish came to be known in America, not only reproduced a much-desired taste of home, but celebrated the copious amount of meat and tomatoes once- poor Southern Italian women could now put in their gravy.
While the Dukes is among the best-known Italian eateries in New Castle, it’s far from the only one drawing a steady stream of customers.
To celebrate that enduring legacy in the way many like best — with food and maybe a nice glass of red wine — Visit Lawrence County has launched a digital Sunday Sauce Trail to pay homage to the enduring Italian tradition of friends and families gathering on weekends for a meal.
It features 11 Italian restaurants and food businesses offering everything from pizza and homemade wedding soup to handrolled ravioli, fresh Italian basket cheese and handcrafted wines. Based on the number of spots visited and points earned, participants can win prizes including a Sunday sauce t- shirt or apron as well as a New Castle ornament or tumbler.
Assistant director Ginny Colella says the goal is for visitors to enjoy the region’s Italian food “not just on Sunday [at the Dukes], but every day of the week.”
The visitors bureau launched a successful craft burger trail several years ago and also has a self-guided coffee club trail celebrating seven local coffee shops. So showcasing the region’s many Italian food businesses in similar (digital) fashion was something of a nobrainer, says Colella, who started organizing the tour last fall after her Italian husband, Nick, pitched the idea.
“Everyone we approached was immediately on board,” she says.
All in the family
Home to the first theater operated by the Warner Brothers (it opened in 1907 with a hand-cranked projector), New Castle is probably best known for the two Italian fireworks companies that got their start there — Zambelli Fireworks in 1893 and Pyrotecnico in 1922 — earning the city its reputation as the “Fireworks Capital of America.”
Today, Lawrence County still enjoys the highest concentration of Italian Americans of any county in Pennsylvania, with 25.52% of the population reporting Italian roots, according to the U.S. Census bureau.
“There’s so much Italian heritage here,” Colella says. That, in turn, has made for a community that “values the tradition of the Sunday sauce.”
The recent dedication of St. Mary Church’s St. Pio statue on March 9, which canonizes one of the most popular Catholic saints of the 20th century, she adds, made for the perfect time to introduce the tour to the community near and far.
Most of the businesses on the new tour are family run, such as Valentino Cheese, which has been owned by the Gorgacz family since 1986. Famous for the Italian basket cheese it sells in droves in the weeks leading up to Easter and the fresh ricotta that gets stuffed in the Dukes’ ravioli, the tiny shop on West State Street also sells cavatelli, handmade cheese ravioli and manicotti and Papa Canzonetta’s Italian-style jarred peppers.
Kelly Gorgacz, who took over after father Joseph’s death in 2019, says she also sells “a ton” of jarred Mama Pia’s Homestyle Pasta Sauce, which is made by a local company using the Dukes’ original 1960s sauce recipe. It’s a little sweeter than what you’ll find in the restaurant today. Rather nosh on pizza? The tour includes Mangino’s Pizzeria, a hometown favorite started by Chuck and Johanna Mangino in 1979 that boasts two locations: a grab-and-go pizzeria in Mahoningtown and a sit-down, family-style restaurant in Neshannock. Both features pies with Mangino’s famed handpinched edges. Nearly-asold Four Pizzeria Bar & Grille, which opened in 1986 and has al fresco dining in nice weather, offers a halfdozen different red and white wood- fired pizzas along with calzones and authentic antipasti, panino and pasta dishes.
The sole wine bar on the tour, VentiSei, is a relative newcomer. Started by sixthgrade teacher Denny Flora in 2018 to offer on-site consumption and sales of the Italian wines he’s been making with his uncle Rick Flora since the early aughts, it will celebrate its sixth anniversary in August.
Flora ran the local watering hole and sports bar Twenty-Six Bar and Grill (originally known as Mariarcher’s Tavern) as a side gig to his teaching job for nearly 15 years before closing it in Jan. 2018. “But as I got older, I developed more of an interest in wine and winemaking,” he says. VentiSei was the realization of a dream.
Originally serviced by food trucks, the wine bar for the last three years has offered a variety of Margherita and other gourmet pizzas, along with Naples- style folded pizzas, pasta boats, polpette and pepperoni roll -like “puffs.” “We also have a meatball dish that flies out the door,” says Flora, along with Italian desserts such as cannoli. It’s open Thurs.-Sat. from 4-11 p.m.
The name, which means “26” in Italian, pays homage to the number Flora wore on his football jersey when he broke New Castle High School’s all-time rushing record in the mid- 1990s. Five other members of his family, including father, Denny, uncles Sam and Rick, cousin Johnny and his younger brother, Joey, also wore the number as Red Hurricanes.
“I didn’t want it to be a sports bar, but the number just kept sticking,” he says.
The tour also includes stops at New Castle faves Gallo’s Italian Villa, Pagley’s Pasta & More and Soni’s Italian Restaurant, as well as Nico Luciano’s and Vinny’s Pizza and Restaurant in Ellwood City.
Only on Sundays
For better or worse, there’s no wine to accompany meals at the Dukes — probably the most famous stop on the tour —unless you remember to bring it. But the excited chatter and sounds of laughter from the hungry diners that fill the brightly lit dining room make it feel like you’re attending a fun family party.
Promptly at 11:30 a.m., many of its 118 seats are taken by churchgoers who’ve been waiting in the parking lot for the doors to open. The crowd doesn’t thin until the last seating at around 5 p.m.
Which is not surprising, says Marino, because the restaurant has been a hit from day one, thanks to its great food and mystique as a Sundays-only affair.
“It’s an experience,” she says. “It’s not just about eating.”
In the beginning, the women cooked on Fridays and cleaned on Saturdays. These days, its paid staff — most of whom are members of the club — works five days a week to prepare all the food they serve customers.
Every Monday, a core crew of five women — including Morina’s mother, Elmire, and her aunt, Teresa Lucchini — mix and handroll between 120 and 180 pounds of ground meat into more than 1,000 meatballs. Tuesdays and Thursdays are “cavat” days, and on Wednesdays they roll, stuff, seal, pre-boil and bag around 180-dozen ravioli. They’ll be served in orders of 3, 5 or 9, with copious amounts of sauce and meatballs, for about $13 to $25.
“Yesterday we went through 75 pounds of flour,” says Marino, noting that each recipe of cavatelli calls for 24 cups of flour. To stuff all that ravioli, meanwhile, they need 54 pounds of ricotta.
Fridays are for mixing and rolling the egg dough for the restaurant’s silky-smooth, homemade spaghetti.
While the ladies originally made the restaurant’s famed red sauce, eventually the stockpots grew too big and heavy for the women to handle. So these days, it’s made by two men: Marino’s 76-year-old father, Antonio Lucchini, and his older brother, Graziano. They take over the kitchen on Wednesdays as soon as the women — who started at 7 a.m. — have bagged the last ravioli and wiped down the work table.
It takes the siblings about three hours to stir and simmer the 30, 24-quart stockpots of sauce the restaurant powers through each week. They also help to cook and portion the pasta and sauce on Sundays, when the kitchen is “organized chaos,” according to club president Sheryl Skowronski.
While both “sauce guys” are silent on the secret mix of spices they add to the many cans of tomato puree and tomato paste that give the sauce its signature flavor, Graziano is happy to dish on their time-honored technique: “We use the best ingredients, and don’t skimp,” he says.
Making more than 100 gallons of sauce each week is admittedly hard work, says Marino, as she watches her father spoon tomato paste into a stockpot with a rubber spatula. “And they’re excellent at it.” She shoots him a smile. “We’re grateful they do it.”
One of the restaurant’s most popular dishes is its Homemade Platter. A relative bargain at $18.25, it features all three pastas under a river of its famed red sauce, along with a pair of homemade meatballs. The teenaged waiters who take customers’ orders also sell so much cavat some weeks, that they fear they’ll run out. (Don’t worry; they won’t.)
Over the years, the Dukes has added specialties like eggplant and chicken Parmesan, wedding soup and fried zucchini planks to the menu. They also offer a few cheese- and saucetopped sandwiches, along with chicken salad and a kids menu. But it’s the homemade sauce and pasta that customers tend to crave.
Then again, “Everything is good here,” says Marino. “There’s not one bad thing.”
“We cook with love here,” agrees Skowronski.
You can download a digital passport to Lawrence County’s Sunday Sauce Trail at visitlawrencecounty.com.