The Last Stop

Some restaurants serve great food. Others become part of your life. Mario’s checked both boxes. 

In the early 1980s, if you were a kid from Ward Melville High School in Setauket, New York, an Italian restaurant named Mario’s was that special place.

We went after basketball games. We went after parties. Sometimes we’d spend an entire evening cruising around our slice of Long Island, with no particular destination and no particular plan, and somehow, eventually, we’d wind up at Mario’s.

It was often the last stop of the night.

You opened the door and stepped in from the cold. The lighting was dim, the room was warm, and there was an immediate sense of comfort. It was welcoming without trying to be. There was the familiar restaurant noise, the conversation, the laughter, the servers moving between tables. It had an atmosphere that was difficult to manufacture and impossible to forget. It felt like home.

And then there was the pizza.

The meatball pizza was, in a word, spectacular. I don’t mean pretty good. I mean the kind of pizza that, decades later, you can still taste when somebody mentions the name of the restaurant.

But Mario’s was about more than pizza.

My friend Ben worked there as a busboy. His brother Bob was part of that world, too. We’d go partly because we knew Ben would be there. There was something special about seeing one of your buddies working in a place where half the people you knew seemed to gather.

And there was a beautiful young woman who worked as a server. I can’t remember her name anymore. Funny how that works. Forty-five years later, I can remember the restaurant, the atmosphere, the pizza and the feeling of walking through the door. But her name has disappeared. I do however remember her face. Funny how that works too.

I suspect we weren’t the only ones who found reasons to stop by.

Mario’s was part of the social geography of being a teenager in the Three Village area. You had school, sports, friends, parties, cars, music, and the endless business of figuring out who was going where and with whom. There was always somewhere to be, and somehow Mario’s was where the night often came together at the end.

Nobody needed to make a reservation. Nobody needed to organize an occasion. You just showed up.

That’s what made places like Mario’s special. They weren’t destinations in the way we think about restaurants today. They were gathering places. They belonged to the community, and, in a very real way, they belonged to us.

Ben is still a friend. We remain in regular touch. We text, we call, we Zoom. He became a successful entrepreneur. But I remember him when. He still has that wicked sense of humor and that same smile. We both drove classic Mustangs that had seen better days. His car perished in a fire after his mother, a very cool lady, decided to surprise Ben by having his gas gauge fixed.  She was tired of him running out of gas. The mechanic who shall remain anonymous blew the car up.  It was a sad day indeed. All he had left was a charred little Mustang emblem.

His brother Bob eventually went on to own another Long Island institution, the legendary Country House in Stony Brook. How cool is that?

And then, five years ago this month, we went back.

We had returned to Stony Brook for a reunion with old friends. Ben was there. We found our way back to Mario’s and had one more pizza together. We also had an unforgettable dinner at the Country House.

I took a photograph at Mario’s.

At the time, it was just a picture of lunch, a good pizza, and a reunion with people who had been part of my life for so long. I didn’t think of it as a farewell. I didn’t know it would be the last time.

Later, I learned that Mario’s had suffered a fire. I was saddened by the news. When I learned that the restaurant had closed, I was even sadder.

It’s strange how much emotion can attach itself to a place. Mario’s wasn’t just a restaurant where we happened to eat. It was part of growing up. It was the place we went after the game, after the party, after driving around with nowhere in particular to go. It was where we saw friends, knew the people who worked there, and felt, for a few hours, that we belonged.

I wonder how many people who walked through Mario’s doors in those years still remember it the way I do.

Maybe they remember the pizza. Maybe they remember the people who worked there. Maybe they remember a first date, a basketball victory, a late-night conversation, or simply the comfort of walking in on a cold winter night and knowing you’d find someone you knew.

We spend a lot of our lives moving from one place to another, rarely thinking about the significance of the places we’re in at the time.

Then forty-five years pass.

The restaurant is gone. The high school years are gone. The nights of cruising around with nowhere in particular to go are gone.

But I have that photograph. Five years ago, sitting with old friends, with Ben among them, eating one more pizza at Mario’s.

I didn’t know it was the last one.

Maybe that’s what makes the picture so special. We got to go back. We got to sit in that place again, share a meal, and be together. We didn’t know we were saying goodbye, and perhaps that’s just as well.

Some places stay with us long after the doors close.

Mario’s will always be my favorite last stop.