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Dining Out

Italy on the Menu

Thursdays are special at the Buttersburg Inn

July 29, 2008
By Martha Thomas
Photography by Bryan Burris

 
Italy on the Menu Constance Tunzi
 

Constance Tunzi won’t let anyone help her with the chopping. Whether she needs to handle every detail herself or simply won’t let her guests work, she waves her hand dismissively at an offer to dice celery for the minestrone soup. She does, however, ask for help pulling a giant soup pot from a shelf. At 5′1″, Mama Connie, as she’s called, can’t reach it. She also accepts help cranking the top off a giant can of stewed tomatoes, a tricky undertaking with a dull can opener that she can’t manage with her arthritic hands.

Normally she would use tomatoes from her own garden — she canned and stored 150 jars in the basement of her Hampstead home last summer. But today she’s cooking for a crowd, as she does once a week at the Buttersburg Inn.

The Buttersburg Inn

The Buttersburg Inn

The Buttersburg Inn — really a small restaurant with seating for a couple dozen — is on Main Street in Union Bridge, about 10 miles southwest of Westminster. Connie’s son Frank Tunzi and his partner, Jim Rowe, bought the place in 2002. If customers worried that avant-garde items like dried cranberries and cumin would start showing up in the food, they needn’t have. Rowe, who manages the kitchen, is committed to the traditions of his Pennsylvania Dutch relatives. Many still live nearby.

“People don’t like anything too fancy,” he says. Depending on the day, the menu lists meatloaf, liver and onions, chipped beef in cream sauce served on toast, fried chicken and Maryland hog maw (pig stomach stuffed with sausage, onions and potatoes). Side dishes might be lima beans or buttered carrots, corn and apple fritters or mashed potatoes with gravy. “We try to stay away from foreign food,” says Rowe (which rhymes with “now”).

Except for Thursdays. That day, every week, the restaurant goes Italian, with Mama Connie responsible for the menu. A native of Puglia, Italy — “right on the heel of the boot,” says Frank — Connie serves up eggplant Parmesan and spaghetti with meatballs, minestrone soup and braised roast beef.

While most items on the Buttersburg menu involve meat, the daily vegetarian entrées are Connie’s doing. Her eggplant Parmesan is thin slices of eggplant, breaded and layered with cheese, served on angel hair pasta with tangy tomato sauce. She also makes meatless manicotti.

She generally prepares for the Thursday- night dinners during the day on Tuesdays, when the restaurant is relatively quiet. She’ll roll up to 200 meatballs in a day, along with lasagna and chicken Parmigiana. Her meat sauce doesn’t fuss with oregano and basil; it’s just plain tomatoes and ground beef with garlic, onions, Parmesan cheese and olive oil. The secret, Frank says, is that it simmers all day long.

Though she has never been a professional chef, Connie has cooked all her life. She grew up in a village outside Bari — where plenty of family members, including her 98-year-old aunt, still live — and learned to cook from her mother. In the United States, besides working as a tailor she kept busy feeding her four sons.

The Tunzi family came to the U.S. in 1974. Connie and her husband, Nick, went to work as tailors for Jos. A. Banks and settled in Hampstead. Connie retired in 1996, but she still lives in the home she shared with Nick, who died in 2003. She also still cooks for her family at home on Wednesday nights. Most weeks she doesn’t know whom to expect. Frank and Jim; Vito and his wife, Cherie; her other sons, Pino and Bert; and any combination of the six grandchildren might show up.

Connie brings the food to the table: homemade focaccia (her secret recipe, which includes potatoes); shrimp steamed with vinegar and a sprinkling of Old Bay; penne pasta with tomato sauce and grated Parmesan — even a salad made with iceberg lettuce and midwinter tomatoes from the grocery store is delicious, dressed simply with olive oil and salt. After dinner, rich coffee steams in the kitchen. Connie pours it into tiny Italian espresso cups and puts a plate of macaroons and butter cookies on the table.

There’s no espresso machine at the Buttersburg Inn and the desserts are not Italian. Dessert, Jim’s special department, is not to be missed. This time of year you’ll find strawberry shortcake, made with only local berries and fresh whipped cream. In summer he’ll make peach pie, and his peanut butter and chocolate cake is available year round.

Jim has known many of the customers all his life. They rave about the fried chicken and the cucumber and onion salad, made with a recipe from Jim’s grandmother. Photographs of Buttersburg Inn-sponsored Little League teams line the walls, along with pictures of the town 100 years ago. For holidays, Jim and Frank hang garlands decorated with hearts, four-leaf
clovers or Easter eggs.

But on Thursdays, no matter the time of year, the Buttersburg Inn is transported to southern Italy.

 
 
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