Leonardo Caporale was not happy. It seems that when we said there was a jinx on the site of the restaurant building he owns in Arlington Heights, the connotations that reverberated in his community of friends and business associates went way beyond anything we intended.
The word “jinx” means much more than a run of bad luck to Italians, he noted.
“It’s like saying that somebody died there, that it is a bad place and will always be bad, that somebody has put a curse on it,” he said.
“And to Italians, putting a curse on someone is worse than putting them in the wall, or breaking their face,” he laughed.
For the record, we don’t think anybody ever died at the white brick building along Arlington Heights Road, or that any evil spell has been cast on the building itself, which has been the home to his own La Gondola, followed by Martell’s, Scoccio’s, Gagster’s, The Carriage House and Fratelli’s. Caporale retired beause of heart surgery.
Our point was simply that after his successful run in the location, five restaurants have closed down in pretty short order, and that doesn’t seem to indicate that anybody was enjoying much good luck there.
Luck, says Caporale, has nothing to do with it. It seems there are a lot of people out there who simply become enchanted with the idea of running a restaurant and don’t know what they are getting into.
“When I ran this restaurant, the health department used to send other restaurant owners to see how clean the kitchens were,” he said, pointing to equipment that now looks less than sanitary.
Among the many mistakes by subsequent owners, he says, the interior remodeling was the first bad move, especially because it required closing the doors on a successful operation for three months. He ticks off other mistakes made over the years: prices that were way too high; owners who used canned tomato sauce for their panzerotto (a type of pizza that folds over on itself); black tableclothes that made the place look like a funeral home; restaurant names that made people laugh; and at least one previous owner who didn’t pay utility bills.
“One Italian name actually translated into `Don’t Bother Me,’ ” he laughed. “Another time, I walked into the dining room and the owner was screaming at a waitress in front of customers,” he said. “That is not the way to run a restaurant. Is that being jinxed? I don’t think so.”
Another honor for Mall City: Although everybody in the Chicago area seems to enjoy making fun of Schaumburg and using it as an example of what happens when rampant growth goes unchecked, the home of Woodfield Mall seems to have a more respectable profile nationwide.
Schaumburg was recently named one of 20 finalists (in the under-100,000 population category) in the City Livability Awards program held by the United States Conference of Mayors and co-sponsored by Waste Management.
Mayors in these 20 towns will submit in writing why their town is such a great place to live, and one winner each in the over- and under-100,000 categories will be named at the Annual Conference of Mayors meeting in Reno on June 22.
We can hardly wait to see if Schaumburg beats out Trenton, N.J., and Euless, Texas, not to mention Berwyn, the only other Illinois town to make the list.
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E-mail: WinterC@aol.com. Or you can visit Christine Winter’s message board at http://www.chicago.tribune.com/go/winter to discuss northwest suburban issues.
