Oral History: Beverly Panfilli – October, 2004

Summary:

Beverly Panfilli Littorno was interviewed by Julie Sullivan in October, 2004. Her father Adolph, who had experience working in commercial fishery, along with her mother Barbara, opened a small fish market on Old Tunnel Road in 1945. It soon became a restaurant as well, called Lafayette Seafood Grotto. This business became one of the best known of the many restaurants that have operated in Lafayette over the years, lasting until the late 1980’s. Beverly recalls that all of the family members, including those with full-time jobs, worked long hours in the restaurant every week.

Oral History:

When Adolph and Barbara Panfilli opened a small fish market on old Tunnel Road in 1945, they didn’t know they were starting a Lafayette tradition. A year later, the fish market began evolving into the Lafayette Seafood Grotto, a restaurant long-time residents remember fondly.

Adolph Panfilli was from Berkeley and his wife, Barbara, was born outside Port Chicago. After they married, both worked for the fruit canneries in Antioch, and Adolph helped out on a family ranch in Antioch. Then Adolph joined his uncle in commercial fishing, and the family including daughter Beverly, born in 1934, and son Gaeton (known as Sonny), born in 1936, spent part of the year in Monterey during the sardine fishing season and part of the year in San Francisco. “We always had a flat in North Beach and a home in Monterey,” Beverly (Panfilli) Littorno remembers. “The fishing industry was lucrative at that time. It kept my father out of the war, because it was a necessary industry.

“I guess I must have been about ten or eleven, right at the end of the war when we moved back to San Francisco,” she says. “My grandparents still lived in Antioch, so we would drive from San Francisco to Antioch on the weekends. When we drove through the tunnel and came to Lafayette, my dad would always say, ‘This would be a good spot to put in a fish market.’ And that’s how it all started.

“My dad and mom opened the Crab Shack around the end of 1945, the first day of crab season, which is the first Tuesday of November. They would leave us kids with my father’s mother in North Beach. My dad would go down to the wharf at three o’clock in the morning, get the fish and pick up my mom, then they’d drive out to Lafayette. They’d close the market around six o’clock at night, drive back to San Francisco, pick us kids up, and we’d go out to dinner.

“Do you know where McCaulou’s is on Mt. Diablo Boulevard? On the top, where McCaulou’s is was a little building, and that’s where they sold the fish and cracked and cleaned the crab. But what they called the Shack was down facing what is now Mt. Diablo Boulevard, right across from that little plaza. Starting out, they sold fish and boned crab. People would drive up to the Shack and honk the horn. If my brother and I happened to be there, we would run down, take an order, then run back up. Then my dad or mom would crack and clean the crab.

“It was hard in winter to run back and forth with the crab, and a man named Tony had an open air produce market/ fruit stand. He was looking to sublease his property, so my mom and dad opened a fish counter on one side of Tony’s fruit stand, and my dad also sold bait.”

Adolph started a fish delivery route through Walnut Creek, Alamo and Danville on Tuesday and Thursday. “Only then it was very country,” Beverly explains. “I’d go with him sometimes and wrap the fish. He would honk the horn, and people would come out and buy it.”

Eventually the Panfillis leased the whole building. “The Grotto didn’t start like it ended up,” Beverly says with a laugh. “At the Crab Shack there was a fish counter where people could pick up orders. Then my mom started making clam chowder and selling shrimp and crab cocktails, always to go. And that’s all they did at the beginning. There was a big walk-in box right behind the counter, and people could look right in there.”

Around that time the family moved to Bickerstaff Street in Lafayette and later to Moraga Boulevard. Beverly went to Acalanes High School, and her brother went to Stanley.

“My dad opened early in the morning to sell bait to the fishermen, and the highway patrol started coming in to have coffee with him. My dad eventually gave them a key to the restaurant so that whatever shift was on, they’d go into the restaurant and make coffee.

“It was just the counter and mom and dad and us two kids for many years. Then my mom started frying prawns and scallops, and we got some tables in. Later they took the counter out and gradually did little things to the restaurant, finally moving the kitchen and putting a walk-in box and a new crab pot outside.”

Beverly graduated from Acalanes in 1952 and married Andrew Littorno in 1954. The wedding was held at then-new St. Perpetua’s Church. “I remember my dad invited every customer that came in. We expected 400, and I think about 600 came.”

Beverly continued working part time at the Grotto after her three children were born. “My mom was a dynamo,” she says with admiration. “For a long time she did all the cooking by herself. She could run that whole restaurant, and even when she had someone working with her in the kitchen, they were never fast enough.

“Everything was done from scratch,” she says proudly. “My mother made the chowder, the cocktail sauce, the Roquefort dressing. No cans were opened. She had never made a chowder in her life, and she had probably never made a cocktail sauce in her life, but she liked cooking. I don’t ever remember her even going into a cookbook.”

The Grotto was a real family affair. Beverly’s husband, a firefighter, worked in the restaurant when he was off duty. On Friday night her Uncle George bartended, and his wife Jean was the hostess. Another aunt worked in the kitchen. “They all worked at day jobs,” Beverly says, “But on Friday nights they all came and worked at the Grotto, just because they were family. They didn’t get paid.”

The grotto closed at 2:00 p.m. and opened again at 4:00 p.m. “On Friday at two o’clock my mom would go to the bakery and buy eclairs and Napoleons and cream puffs. After we closed on Friday night, the whole family always went to my parents’ house and played poker until like two in the morning, then had coffee and pastries – because they didn’t open the restaurant for lunch on Saturday.”

Around 1958 the Panfillis subleased the restaurant to another couple, with the understanding that Beverly, who was well known to the customers, would stay on for a certain length of time. “It just wasn’t the same after my mom left,” Beverly reflects. Beverly left around 1960. Beverly’s parents moved to Antioch, where her father went into business with his brothers distributing bait throughout northern California.

In 1961, when Adolph agreed to take the Grotto back, Beverly’s mother wasn’t interested. “My brother and I knew one of us had to go into the business with my dad, and my brother decided to do it.” Sonny, a graduate of San Francisco State, left his engineering job with Dow Chemical. “He helped with everything, worked in the kitchen, hosted, waited tables. Then my mother came back. We knew she would,” Beverly laughs.

In 1969 when Adolph passed away, Sonny and Barbara continued running the Grotto. Barbara remarried in the mid-1970’s and sold the restaurant to Sonny. Barbara and her husband lived in the Philippines for several years. “But she made a lot of trips back,” Beverly says. “And every time she was here, she went back to work at the Grotto.

“During the Christmas holidays, the demand for crab was so great that there would be people lined up half a block outside the Grotto. My daughter and my brother’s daughter would alphabetize the orders for clam chowder, cocktail sauce, Thousand Island Dressing, shrimp, crab and oysters. I remember my husband getting home at 4:00 a.m., exhausted, then going back at 8:00 a.m. The people who didn’t put orders in had to come and stand in line.”

Beverly, who returned to work at the Grotto, left again in 1983, when she and a partner opened the Courtyard Café in Alamo. Like the Grotto, the Courtyard was a family affair. “When we started opening on Thursday, Friday and Saturday for dinner, my Aunt Lou came out to help. She still loves to cook. In fact, we have cooking classes at my home in Alamo.”

In 1985, when Sonny was left partially disabled from a boating accident Beverly’s mother once again took over. Barbara passed away, and the Grotto closed in the late 1980’s.

Beverly has vivid memories of the Grotto and of Lafayette when she first came here. “There’s a story behind the paintings that used to be on the Grotto’s walls. Before my parents remodeled the building, these two guys came in and asked if they could paint murals. One was Paul Pumphrey. They agreed to paint scenes of the wharfs in Monterey. All one wall was Monterey, and on the adjacent wall they painted a picture of my dad fishing. My husband and I were in an art gallery on Fisherman’s Wharf years later, and we saw pictures of Monterey signed by Paul Pumphrey.

“De Vincenzi’s Deli was where Pasta Per Tutti is now. Where Postino’s is now was a beauty shop. Then, in the little plaza on the other side of the Squirrel’s Nest, there was a Standard gas station and a restaurant called Pop Luce. In the afternoon, my brother and I would get ice cream sundaes there. Right where the signal is now on Mt. Diablo and Moraga Road was a restaurant called Dutch Bill’s.

“My favorite store was a dress shop called Hill ‘n Dale in a little shopping center on Mt. Diablo Boulevard. When you came out of Acalanes High School parking lot and drove toward Lafayette there was a little hill, and on the top was Rick’s Drive-In.

“After the restaurant closed for the night, my dad always had a special dinner for all of us. I remember Claude, the African-American who worked for us, never wanted to sit at the table with us. He’d always sit at the counter. My dad said, ‘You get your plate and you come down here and eat.’

“There were a lot of fields and undeveloped property in Lafayette. There was a parking lot next to the Grotto, then Flavio’s, an Italian restaurant. Next to Flavio’s was a driveway, and across from that was Petar’s restaurant. Before Petar’s, Jay Bedsworth had a restaurant there. He’d take a dollar bill and flip it up to the ceiling with a thumbtack. The whole ceiling was thumbtacks.

“I know progress does happen, but the little grocery stores like Pioneer Market run by Vince & Sarah Lombardi are gone. Everybody knew everybody. I miss the quaintness of Lafayette, the small town.”

Excerpted from “Voices of Lafayette” by Julie Sullivan. This book is available for purchase in the History Room.