Looking ahead to the end of December, when Varallo’s Restaurant on Church Street will close its doors for the last time, the 85-year-old proprietor Frank Varallo admits to a bit of impending separation anxiety. “I’m dreading it,” he says.
“Yeah, he’s dreading it,” says Eva, his wife of 61 years, “ ’cause he’s more sentimental than I am. But I think after a month or two, then he’ll wished he’d a done it longer ago.”
Frank doesn’t argue the point. “May start fishin’ again,” he says.
Elsewhere, news of the chili parlor’s imminent closing has been met with something closer to desperation. “It’s a sad day,” people say. Though the beloved “Three-Way” chili (beans, tamales, and spaghetti) will still be served at the second Varallo’s at 239 Fourth Ave. N., most despair of losing the ramshackle ambience of the Church Street institution itself.
More than a favorite eatery, Varallo’s traffics in the city’s street-level history, linking Oilers-era Nashville with the Central Athletic Club baseball team of 1913. At Varallo’s, the hundred-year progress of public affairs can be read in the chaos of photos lining the walls—public affairs, naturally, being understood to include professional wrestling.
“The richest people in Nashville, the biggest politicians, the poorest people, the in-between—everybody comes together in Varallo’s Restaurant,” says Don McGehee, an ex-wrestler himself and a Varallo’s patron since the 1930s. “That’s the way it’s always been operated.... It’s just, sort of like, I guess, Basin Street, where everybody meets.”
Politicians meet to learn how to vote, newsmen to learn how they’re going to vote. For years Varallo’s has served as a gathering place and opinion clearinghouse for political junkies and those they follow, people whose names are preserved in the marble and tar of the buildings and streets of the city. Time was when sworn enemies like Ben West and Beverly Briley could be seen at Varallo’s eating under the same roof, if not quite at the same table. Former county sheriff Fate Thomas remembers when Estes Kefauver, later the national scourge of the syndicate, showed up one day from Chattanooga to introduce himself around. He also remembers Jimmy Hoffa’s cronies eating at Varallo’s during the city’s famous Hoffa trial; “I remember people being in there from both sides,” Thomas says.
“Back then, it was a sort of a sign of success to get your picture up on the wall in there,” says former Nashville Banner editor Eddie Jones. “I think probably most of the mayors have been up there, and God knows how many councilmen, probably some congressmen too.” While serving as Frank Clement’s press secretary, Jones would hit Varallo’s whenever he “kind of wanted to get up to speed on what’s going on in Nashville, particularly getting around campaign time. You’d go to Varallo’s and have lunch and circulate around two or three tables, and you could almost run a little mini-poll in there on community attitudes.”
Fate Thomas concurs. “You could pretty well tell who’s gonna win by listening to the conversation of the people there,” he says.
Truly, beneath the cacophonous banter about football and fishing and Albert Gore can be heard the undulating subtext of community life. Every weekday they congregate—doctors and lawyers, suits and hardhats, judges and those they have judged. They come to chat with Metro councilman Vic Varallo, Frank’s nephew, or with Tony Varallo, Frank’s grandson. They come to eat and see friends and talk shop, or, more likely, to get away from talking shop.
To look in at Varallo’s at lunchtime and see the clientele, you would think the city’s entire fate turned on an order of Chili Mac. But sometimes a meal is just a meal, and talk is of lighter truths. State Sen. Doug Henry, a devoted regular, recalls when he and some fellow history buffs decided at Varallo’s “to try to mount a search for the zero milepost marker,” which stood in front of the Capitol as “the point from which all highway mileage in Tennessee was measured.” The marker disappeared during a Capitol construction project. Henry and his friends never found it. Such are the losses recorded on Church Street.
An informal group of judges and lawyers, facetiously known to themselves as the “Squareheads of the Round Table,” have been meeting at Varallo’s twice a week for years. But Court of Appeals Judge Ben H. Cantrell, a member since 1980, notes sadly that the Round Table’s ranks have been thinning. “There’s a picture on the wall right behind the table that they generally reserve for us,” he says. “And it includes Judge Harbison, Judge Charlie Neese, Sanders Anglea, and Jordan Stokes. And they’re all gone now.”
In this and so many other ways, the dank light inside Varallo’s bathes it in an almost unutterable poignancy. The kitchen door is worn through at palm-level, swung open God only knows how many times. The counter stools have been unscrewed from their poles and stacked in a corner. Next to one table hangs a poem titled “On Letting Go.” And in a front picture window outside, a “For Lease” sign leans against two girls’ softball trophies. Says Lisa Smiley, one of three friends who come for lunch from jobs at the Lifeway Christian Resources complex, she’ll miss “hearing the daily reports on Tony’s softball team.”
But what the regulars say they’ll miss the most is just saying hello to Frank and Eva, whose personalities have long set the tone at Varallo’s. “They’re interested in their customers, good to everybody,” says Judge Cantrell. “They’re just good people.”
“Very warm, affable; they obviously like people,” agrees Eddie Jones. “Usually somebody’s gonna know you by name. And if they don’t, there’s a big smile, ‘Well come on in, honey, let me—what kind of table you want today?’ And that kind of thing.”
Tales of the Varallos’ generosity are rampant, and the loyalty they inspire couldn’t be more evident. Among several longtime employees, Rome “Pat” Patterson retired after more than 50 years at the restaurant. Server Cheryl McKnight hired on straight out of high school in 1974 and has never left. “They treat me like I’m in the family,” she says. Grandsons Todd and Tony Varallo, both of whom started at the restaurant as kids, and who together will have charge of the Fourth Avenue location from here on in, stress how comfortable it’s been to grow up in the business under their grandparents’ tutelage.
Frank and Eva smile easily and laugh easily and trade off each other’s sentences with the casual synergy of two people together nearly their entire lives. Behind her horn-rimmed glasses, Eva’s eyes seem permanently flecked with mirth. Frank’s sense of humor is no less acute, but less obvious, surfacing when something in a conversation triggers his memory of one of the restaurant’s more hilarious episodes.
There was, for instance, the time before the war when one of his delivery men got busted for running a whorehouse in the red-light district back of Capitol Hill. Hadn’t Frank known about the man’s sideline, the incredulous lawman wondered? “No, I didn’t, inspector,” Frank said, “but now that you tell me, I know why [he’s] been able to buy a new automobile every year.”
Eva’s got a bad knee and doesn’t get to the restaurant so often anymore, but Frank hangs tough. Splendidly attired in chef’s cap and bow tie, he stands posted behind the steam table, impassive, a rock, spooning the greens that some love as much as his Three-Way Chili. It’s as if he and the worn building, the bricks knocked out on the southwest corner, have aged apace, neither willing to retire without the other.
His hearing isn’t what it used to be, but he’s quick to return the greetings of friends and neighbors who walk in saying, “Hiya, Frank, how ya doing? Heard you were closing down.” With startling zip, his open hand extends to the customer’s over the glass. Frank Varallo’s handshake is more than congenial; it’s elemental, the clasp of a good man to whom the good in others is taken on faith. In other words, the gesture of a man from a different time than ours.
Maybe it’s that his daddy, Frank Varallo Sr., was an Italian immigrant said to have worked for seven years as an interpreter on Ellis Island. The new world’s offer of comfort and hope invited a babel of global tongue—a rich, disharmonious song of people from many lands engaged with a young republic. Frank Sr. understood them. “He was a linguist,” says his son. “He spoke seven different languages.”
Raised in Viggiano, 35 miles south of Naples, the elder Varallo was also a child prodigy violinist. “His mother and father died when he was very young,” Frank Jr. says. “He was raised by his grandparents. And he left home when he was 9 years old, with an orchestra. Played on these steam ships, and they went all over the world.”
Frank Sr.’s musical journeys brought him to America, where besides easing his fellow immigrants’ way through the often harrowing processing station in New York Harbor, he also had the honor of playing violin at Teddy Roosevelt’s presidential inauguration. Though relatively few Italian immigrants made the South their destination, Frank Varallo’s travels nevertheless brought him to Nashville. Many of the musicians he knew in Viggiano had either come here or gone to Augusta, Ga. Somehow, Eva says, word had gotten around that Nashville “was a good place for music.” Who knew?
Frank never had a chance to play Nashville’s Grand Opera House, though, because a hunting accident paralyzed the nerves in his left hand, ending his career as a concert violinist. By then, according to Varallo family lore, he had already picked up the recipe for his famous chili from some people he played for in South America. “He used to cook this chili for groups of people that he played the violin with, you know, in the orchestra,” Frank Jr. says.
“Yeah. Partying!” chimes in Eva.
After the hunting accident, “his friends encouraged him to go in business and sell his chili,” Frank says. The elder Varallo set up a cart inside the Climax Saloon at 210 Fourth Ave. N. and soon became known there as “Frank the Chili King.”
“They say that the chili was so hot at the time that you had to be drunk to eat it,” his son says. That was just as well, because at the Climax Saloon a lot of people were drunk. Perhaps the most notorious of the “Men’s Quarter” watering holes of turn-of-the-century Nashville, the Climax catered to gentleman gamblers and whiskey drinkers and even had a secret alcove where prostitutes could hide during raids. Other women stayed away as a matter of course. “Women didn’t go in places like that,” Eva says. “Ladies didn’t, no. You were branded if anybody caught you.”
No doubt preferring a family trade, Frank Varallo toned down the heat factor and opened his own restaurant at 708 Broadway, at what is now the site of the Hume-Fogg magnet school, in 1907. A few years later, he and Domenick Petrucelli briefly operated the Subway at 4th and Union. Then in 1919, Frank moved Varallo’s to 811 Church St., just a few doors east of the current location, and hung a sign in the window that said “Ladies Invited.”
The restaurant remained there until the 1950s, sharing the block with a jewelry store owned by Frank’s brother John (Vic’s father) and a speakeasy called the Pink Elephant. At 817 Church, right on the corner of Ninth Avenue, stood Floyd’s Chili Parlor, owned by the Varallos’ friend Floyd Aubrey. When Aubrey died, his wife suggested the Varallos take over the place and let her stay on as cashier. Frank Jr., by then sole proprietor, agreed. “She didn’t want to think about something to do,” he says.
Frank A. Varallo Jr. was born Feb. 19, 1914, in a house built by his father at 1036 Chickamauga St. As a youngster, Frank didn’t see too much of his father because the elder Varallo put in 16- to 18-hour days at the restaurant, seven days a week. “They closed Christmas Day,” Frank says. But when old enough to ride the streetcar, Frank began working at the restaurant, wrapping tamales.
Back then everybody chipped in and stayed close. The Varallos and several other Italian families, some with roots in Viggiano, created a small enclave in the section of East Nashville where Frank grew up. They frequented a local Italian-American Club, started restaurants together, and married into one another’s families, creating prewar chili dynasties to rival the Medicis.
Melfi, Petrucelli, Zanini—all were names linked over time with Varallo’s. Frank Jr.’s brother Nick married Domenick Petrucelli’s daughter Frances; son and father-in-law later opened Nick & Domenick’s on Church Street. Frank Jr.’s sister Marie married Joe Zanini, later the owner of an upscale establishment on Sixth Avenue.
Other than Zanini’s, which offered live classical music with its fine dining, the restaurants in the Varallo’s circle all carried basically the same menu: chili, and meat-and-threes. Each had its own recipes—Eddie Jones mentions a concoction known as “Mother Melfi’s Medicated Meatballs”—but the choices varied little, and prices not at all.
“We’d get together, before we’d change any prices or anything, and we’d all change the prices the same time. You know, go up a nickel here, a nickel there,” Frank says, no little amused at memory of the families’ high-stakes collusion. “I remember right after the war started, we decided to go up 2 cents on a cup of coffee. Coffee was a nickel. So we decided to go up to 7 cents for a cup of coffee.”
Frank Varallo and Eva Reale didn’t need any dynastic matchmaking to facilitate their union. An act of God took care of that. In the early evening of March 14, 1933, a tornado—“just as bad, even worse,” Eva says, than the one last April—rocked Nashville. “Swooping down with a roar of ‘five freight trains,’ ” the Banner reported, “the wind struck the Public Square, wrecking four large buildings, and screamed on into East Nashville.” The tornado reportedly killed more than 30 people in the midstate, including some in Nashville, and it damaged Eva’s family’s house so heavily they had to move. They settled next door to the Varallos, whose boy Frank had already had his eye on Eva. The couple’s four years of “going together” began in the wreckage of the neighborhood they knew as home.
Frank and his brother Nick had been jointly managing Varallo’s since their father died in 1929, and they did so until Nick left circa 1938 to open Nick & Domenick’s. At that point Frank took sole charge. With or without family, it wasn’t easy keeping a restaurant open during the Depression. Frank remembers “people up on Church Street, trying to sell apples for a nickel. It was just bad times.” A child then, Vic Varallo says he would sometimes help out at his uncles’ restaurant just to have something to eat. To save on expenses, the Varallos grew some of their own restaurant vegetables in a garden at home. “I remember my mother used to have those onions in the basement just lined up,” Frank says, motioning with his hand to show how they hung from the ceiling.
On the other hand, with its streetcars and shops and theaters, its neon-lit jumble of passersby, the Church Street vicinity was the hot spot to come hang out on any given night. “When I was younger, you know, my teens and all, we would hurry to get a parking place on Sixth Avenue, that’s to watch the people go by,” Eva recalls. “That was like going to the movies. That was the entertainment in those days.”
Eva took a job as cashier at Candyland (later Vandyland), then located at Seventh and Church. For her half-hour lunch break, Frank would pick her up in his rumble-seated 1929 Ford coupe, and they would drive out Highway 100 to a log cabin joint that served country ham. “I’d be waiting right outside for him,” Eva says. “He’d pick me up at the door, at the sidewalk there, and we’d go out there and get us a ham sandwich and eat it on the way home. In 30 minutes.”
“There was very little traffic on the highway,” Frank explains.
“Yeah,” Eva explains further, “there was no traffic then. And you didn’t have laws too much how fast you could go.”
Frank and Eva married in 1937, and she still jokes she “might have to put some reins on him” after he retires.
“They’re just probably the happiest couple I’ve ever, ever, ever known,” says Don McGehee. “They’ve always been that way.”
McGehee first met the Varallos in the late 1930s, when he was a teenager working as a “soda jerker” at the Hermitage Hotel. After serving in the Marines during World War II, he returned to Nashville and eventually joined the mid-century wrestling circuit immortalized on the walls at Varallo’s. Later the state director of probation and paroles, and an active community volunteer, he crouches in a photo on the fighters’ wall-of-fame in the restaurant’s back room. Other hammerlocks-waiting-to-happen read, “To my friends Nick and Frank: Joe Dillman: 1936,” or, “To my friend Frank Varallo from Herb Welch: world’s junior heavyweight champion: 4/11/46.”
In the 1920s and ’30s, wrestling matches were held downtown at a place called Page’s Garage, later at the Hippodrome on West End. Frank and Eva can also remember attending boxing bouts at the Ryman Auditorium (presumably not backstage on Saturday nights). The top local wrestling agent kept his office at the old Tulane Hotel at Eighth and Church, also known for housing one of the city’s first important recording studios. After the night’s last body slam, the wrestlers would head to Varallo’s, which in those days stayed open all night. “Nearly everybody from the Tulane would go over to Frank’s place...’cause a lot of the wrestlers lived there,” McGehee says.
“All of ’em would come for the chili,” adds Eva. “We got to be good friends.” Asked if any were particularly colorful characters, Frank points out a photo of Mildred Burke, dressed in a one-piece suit and showing off her championship belt to a clearly appreciative Al Jolson. Not unappreciative himself, Frank says, “She was the champion lady wrestler.... When she came here, she’d stay at the Tulane Hotel.” One can’t help wondering what she was like. “Tough!” Eva says.
The wrestlers had to be tough, traveling a two-lane entertainment circuit to rival the southwestern honky-tonks for knifings and other audience mayhem. But at Varallo’s the wrestlers were peaceful little lambs compared to the soldiers roaring on Church Street during World War II. According to historian Don H. Doyle’s Nashville Since the 1920s, more than a million soldiers passed through the city in just the first year of the war.
Many, it seems, made their way up Church from Printer’s Alley and the Capitol Hill red-light district to seek the warmth of the famous Three-Way Chili. But first some enjoyed the warmth of the liquor to be had at the Pink Elephant, located off a side hallway behind a two-way mirror in what is now the Varallo’s central dining room. Says Eva, “One man got killed right in this hallway right here.”
At the time, liquor by the drink was illegal, so the Pink Elephant management was “very particular about who they let come in there,” Frank says. Soldiers were welcome, police weren’t. That complicated business for Frank and the various wrestlers and boxers he hired to contend with the loaded patrons from next door. Frank was in the kitchen cooking one night when a couple of soldiers came back to confront him about having their beer cut off. “Well,” Frank told them, “they think you’ve had too much to drink, well they won’t serve you.”
“Well,” answered one of the soldiers, “if you’re not gonna serve us, then well you’re not gonna serve anybody.” The pair took Frank through the back door and locked him outside. “They were rough, boy.”
“He had ones that got mad and broke the commode,” Eva says.
“Just, yeah, you know, just, yeah, they got mad with us and—”
“—broke the commode!”
Both are laughing. “I’d forgotten about that, Mama.”
“We made a lot of friends with the soldiers, though,” Eva says. “They’d come to our home, you know, and all. But some of ’em were pretty rowdy.”
In time the crowds grew to where Frank and his crew couldn’t navigate the aisles to serve the food. He had to start locking the front door during business hours, only letting in new customers as others finished their meals and left. Undeterred, the hungry GIs would line up outside and wait. Discouraged locals broke themselves of the habit of coming to Varallos at night, so a few years after the war Frank ended his nighttime hours. He also annexed the Pink Elephant and turned it into a dining room. When the Pink Elephant’s owner, a friend of Frank’s, came by at lunch one day to see how the former liquor joint had been transformed, he said, “Yeah, Frank, it looks nice. But you’ll never make the money in here that I made.”
No one can quite pinpoint when Varallo’s became a political hangout, they only agree that it’s been that way a long time. “Gerst Haus, Jimmy Kelly’s, and Varallo’s were the places,” says James D. Squires, author of the rollicking Nashville political memoir The Secrets of the Hopewell Box. Squires was a young Tennessean reporter in the early 1960s, when many of the people he wrote about in the book could be seen conversing over Varallo’s chili.
Nearly etched in the restaurant walls are the day-by-day markings of the volatile times Squires chronicles, when events like the Baker v. Carr reapportionment case made Nashville a Southern frontier outpost of Camelot. Varallo’s serves as a reminder that the South’s most democratic impulses often revolve around food, which is one reason the right to be served in public could be so symbolic of freedom.
The Varallos witnessed that great civil rights battle too—not on their premises, but as the black students streamed by their windows, ready to sit in at the department store lunch counters downtown. “Not a one of ’em would come in,” Eva says. “We had already discussed it.... We would’ve served them, you know.” The Varallos certainly knew what was at stake. Frank remembers in the years before the war, blacks weren’t allowed on the streets of Nashville past midnight. Those who worked late for him got stranded when the last streetcar, the “Owl,” quit running at 1 a.m. “I used to take my help home so the police wouldn’t beat ’em up,” he says. “I had to.”
Curiously, for all the political history his walls contain, Frank apparently has never been much of a player himself. But his restaurant has long been central to a Nashville Catholic community noted for providing strong political organizers. Hence it’s been suggested that some of the individuals who’ve had their picture taken with Frank have done so with votes in mind.
Mainly, though, the Varallos “had a business maybe where a lot of people meet, and you could really get a feeling of what was going on,” Fate Thomas says. It’s as if Frank’s benign disinterest in playing the game assured him of his restaurant’s popularity among those who live for it. Vic Varallo had to laugh recently when he overheard his impish uncle tell someone why Varallo’s was shutting down: “When they put in term limits, Vic got mad, said he’d get even and close the restaurant.”
In the end, though, all of the goodwill and political pull couldn’t save the Varallos’ beloved Church Street. As people and businesses moved to the suburbs, the neighborhood slowly shut down. In the old days, Frank could count a dozen restaurants within a one-block radius of his own. Sears & Roebuck stood on one corner, the Tulane Hotel on another, the gas company across the way, the telephone company behind. One by one they left Church Street, as did the days when Eva and her friends would sit all night just watching the crowds. The theaters turned into porn houses, and then into wrecking-ball bait.
“What affected, I think, or hurt us more than anything was when they made Church Street one way,” Eva says. “You couldn’t park on the street and all.” Today if you stand at Eighth and Church, facing west up the block to Varallo’s, the perfunctory signage tells a hungry stranger, “Wrong Way.”
“I just hate to see it close,” Don McGehee says, “because it’s more than a restaurant.... Every time I walk in there, I’m going back home.” His is not an isolated lament. Lisa Smiley, Rhonda Burnett, and Sheila Lassiter walk up from the Lifeway complex to take their lunch break at Varallo’s nearly every workday. “We won’t have anywhere to go after they close,” Burnett says.
“The tradition of family businesses is—sort of seems to be going by the wayside,” says Eddie Jones. “And food, restaurants, now I think tend to be more based on market research, national trends, and not just on guts and the seat of your pants and finding something that works.”
Of course, if they haven’t already, many of the Varallo’s regulars are bound to head to the Fourth Avenue location, where Todd and Tony Varallo will keep the tamales rolling. Opened five years ago, the Varallo’s on Fourth sold out its entire first day’s chili supply before closing. “We never even had a grand opening,” Todd says.
Like their grandparents, Todd and Tony have an easy way with the customers, and clearly both have inherited the Varallo sense of humor. Eddie Jones, for one, definitely plans on stopping in to see them. “You gotta have some chili about once or twice a month,” he says. “It’s the only thing that keeps your cholesterol in shape.”
But there’s no disputing Varallo’s will be different without Frank standing by. It’s just hard for people to fathom his retiring. The truth is, serving chili hasn’t been the same for Frank since Eva hasn’t been at the restaurant so much. “As long as she was up here running around working with him, there’s no telling how long they would have went,” Tony says. “But now that she’s at home...he misses her, it’s hard without her, and you can tell he wants to be home with her now.”
Sure enough, asked what he’ll do from here on in, Frank’s hand shoots out, startlingly quick, then gently covers Eva’s on the table. “Well, we haven’t spent too much time together,” he says. “So we’re gonna spend a little more time together.”
