Lifestyle

In for the long haul

Serving a slice of life since ’63

When Salvatore Bartolomeo started in the pizza business in 1963, there was no such thing as a spinach slice, an eggplant slice or even a mushroom slice. There sure as heck was no barbecue chicken or “cheeseburger” slice, now some of his best sellers at Rosario’s Pizza on the Lower East Side.

“We had one regular pie, and if you wanted pepperoni we would slice some up and put it on for you,” says Bartolomeo, known to thousands of loyal customers as Sal.

“Back then it was 15 cents for a slice, and 25 cents for a slice and soda,” he says. “It was a simpler time. Nobody was trying to make a lot of money to buy an iPod. My uncle put blue plastic over our black-and-white screen and told us we had a new color TV.”

That uncle was Rosario Dispenza, who opened the pizza parlor on Houston Street near Katz’s Deli. Bartolomeo was just 16 when he went to work for Uncle Rosario, having been fired from a nearby tailor shop because his English was not up to par. Then again, Bartolomeo had only arrived in New York from Sicily two years before.

When it came to rolling out the dough and making the sauce essential for the perfect slice, though, Bartolomeo was a quick study.

“Back then they’d smack you on the rear if you made a mistake, so I learned fast how to do it right,” he says.

Pizza perfection is still paramount for Bartolomeo. Yet mozzarella alchemy is only one part of the job. Just as important is the more intangible connection with his customers. It’s the thing that keeps them coming back decade after decade — and the thing that makes Bartolomeo’s work a labor of love. After 46 years on the job, he can be found behind the counter every night of the week, arriving around 3 p.m. and staying until he closes at 3, 4, sometimes even 5 in the morning. The last time he took an actual vacation was in 1973 — for his own honeymoon.

“This pizza parlor is my home, and I share it with everybody,” he says. “People come from all over the world just to see me, because they know I’m going to put a show on for them.

“Customers I’ve been serving since 1963 will bring their grandkids here, even if they’ve moved to another city. They want the kids to meet Sal.”

The “show” Bartolomeo performs nightly has nothing to do with postcard caricatures of beefy Italian men spinning wheels of pizza dough high overhead. His performance is a million times more personal. It begins with a contagious smile and nod of his head, and, if the mood is right, can end with a two-hour story touching on food, his childhood in Sicily, the boat trip to America at age 14 and, more than anything, his favorite neighborhood in town.

“The people of the Lower East Side are the best of all New York,” he proclaims. “Here you can find people who love you. It doesn’t matter who you are. They speak to people of all classes on the same level. There are no walls up between people. That’s the beauty of this place.”

Bartolomeo is no stranger to the violent crime that defined the neighborhood in the ’70s and ’80s. He doesn’t like to talk about the times he was robbed, when he got whacked in the head with a gun, or the night the cops did a neighborhood-wide raid on illegal squatters and arrested 642 people in one swoop.

“I lost 642 customers in one moment,” he laughs. “That was the slowest day of my life.”

Now that the area has been reborn, the most common form of robbery is the amounts landlords are charging for rent. Bartolomeo lost the lease on Rosario’s first location in 1998, and it took a year before he scored the current spot on Orchard and Stanton. He spent that year walking around the neighborhood every day, just to show his face and let people know he’d be back.

“My father worked until he was 80, and so I’m going to keep up that tradition and stay in business for another 20 years,” he says. “This is my life here.”