Right around the time my childhood ended, my father died, but my mother and I kept returning to Tommaso. We knew if any of us caught the other’s eye we would lose it.
When our parents took us to Tommaso in the ’80s, my brothers and I would try really hard to look at our chicken scarpariello and not each other when Verdillo, dressed in a harlequin costume (it was Carnavale), performed “Ridi Pagliaccio,” a showstopper. That kind of thing can be too much for kids.
Prepare for the most delicious musical performance in Brooklyn. He can’t recall the first time he sang in the restaurant “it just evolved,” he said, from the kitchen to the dining room. His vocal talent was discovered when he was a child singing in church in his teens he studied to be an opera singer in Manhattan, but by his 20s he was no longer aiming for La Scala. “My father thought he was going to have the next Caruso and get rich,” Verdillo told me recently.
The food’s always good, sometimes it’s great, and if the meal doesn’t soar, it doesn’t matter because you’re listening or singing along to opera arias, classic Neapolitan songs, and the occasional pop ballad, provided by Verdillo and a rotating cast of singers with piano accompaniment every weekend. Instead of oil paintings of Chianti bottles, the decor features reproductions of Renaissance frescoes, like that snippet of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel where God extends his hand to create Adam. You can order veal cutlet Parmigiana, but you’ll never see beside it a bowl of anemic penne topped with a circle of tomato sauce. Resident chef/owner/tenor Tommaso Verdillo was honoring white truffle season before many of his peers across the river had even heard of it. Since 1974 this restaurant in Dyker Heights, a section of Brooklyn where hipsters seldom venture, has been serving up dishes that are classic yet transcend Italian-American clichés. Welcome to Red Sauce America, our coast-to-coast celebration of old-school Italian-American restaurants.
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