Curtains on the Booths at Early Italian Restaurant in Amsterdam
Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, 4-10-04
When Orsini’s Royal Restaurant at East Main and Liberty Streets in Amsterdam opened in the 1920s, there were curtains on the booths. Customers who were not Italian “didn’t quite know how to eat spaghetti,” according to a family member, and these patrons closed the curtains when dining on pasta. The Board of Health eventually ordered the curtains removed.
Anthony Orsini, an immigrant from Abruzzi, and his wife Julia Richitelli, born near Naples, started the restaurant, also known as the Royal Lunch, after Anthony learned cooking at Amsterdam’s diners. It was a family business involving sons Ralph, Arthur and Alfred and daughters Mary and Genevieve.
Genevieve Orsini Hartigan Palombo will turn 90 this year and enjoys her family, which today includes brother Alfred, daughter Jennifer Ziskin, stepdaughters Carol Natale and Sandra Mockry, seven granddaughters and five great grandchildren.
Palombo grew up in Amsterdam and was a founder of Psi Chi Phi at the high school, a club for Italian girls. The women still get together and Palombo’s high school class of 1932 held its 71st reunion last year.
After high school, Palombo worked as a waitress at Orsini’s: “We had to wear an apron. We had to wear a decent looking outfit. And we had to be very neat. We had the pencil on a chain.”
Ten cents was a usual tip, and then 25 cents became standard. Waitress Sonie Perillo, who now lives in Florida, “found fifty cents on the table one time and she was really surprised.”
When retired Judge Robert Sise was a youth, he was among youngsters who went to first Friday communion at St. Mary’s Church, then stopped at Orsini’s for breakfast before school. The parents gave the children money and told Palombo to supervise. Sise wanted a chocolate doughnut but Palombo made him have toast or oatmeal. “Bob was a little annoyed with me,” Palombo said.
Richard Ellers, who now lives in Ohio, remembers the Orsini meal ticket. Waitresses punched the ticket, which cost $4.50 but was worth $5 in food. In the Depression, Orsini’s offered a blue-plate special and one of Palombo’s current neighbors on Amsterdam’s Pleasant Avenue still has one of the blue plates. The special cost 35 cents and featured meat or fish, mashed potatoes and vegetables. Coffee was an extra five cents.
The Strand Theater was across the street and stage performers such as Baby Rose Marie and Buddy Ebsen frequented Orsini’s Royal Restaurant.
In the early 1940s, Anthony Orsini relocated to Market Street, next to Montgomery County Trust. The new facility was named Orsini’s Restaurant. It was open 24 hours a day, with young Ralph Orsini handling the overnight shift. There was more room for wedding receptions--a six course Italian meal cost one dollar a plate.
Genevieve Orsini married Edward Hartigan in 1944. Hartigan fought with Merrill’s Marauders in the China-Burma-India Theater in World War Two. He had been a vaudeville performer, bartender and later worked at the Scotia Naval Depot. He died in 1964. They had two children, Michael and Jennifer. Michael died in 1984. The Hartigans lived at the corner of Division and Pine and took in boarders, including members of the Rugmakers baseball team and WCSS announcers.
Orsini’s Restaurant closed in 1955 or 1956. Anthony Orsini then worked as a cook for Tony Griffin at the Wil-Ton Lanes on Main Street. Later, his son Ralph opened an Orsini’s eatery on Wall Street near the former junior high where students bought the best French fries in town in little paper bags.
After Orsini’s closed on Market Street, Palombo waited on tables at Isabel’s on West Main Street and was a waitress for Pedro Perez at the Elks Club and a lakeside restaurant. In 1957, she began working for the New York Retirement System, retiring in 1974. That year, she married Morris Palombo, a widower who was a food broker and vice president of Sofco. Morris Palombo died in 1999.
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