My wife and I have a friend who had a home in the small town of Long Grove, about a 20 minute drive north of the Quad Cities. Had is the correct tense here as she just moved back to West Virginia to be closer to family while her husband works overseas as a government contractor. A couple weeks before she moved, she invited us out to her place to help her make heads or tails of some electronics equipment her husband said to go ahead and sell in the upcoming garage sale. I jumped on the chance to see if there was something that was appealing to me. (There was - I got a vintage Yamaha cassette tape deck player. I haven't had a cassette tape deck player in my system since my Nakamichi LX-3 died - for the third time - a few years back and I didn't want to keep putting money into the thing. And - yes - I still have hundreds of cassette tapes in my music collection.) To further entice us to come out, our friend said that she wanted to go to a new pizza place in Eldridge, the town just to the south of Long Grove. We thought that would be a fun night, so after spending some time going through things at her house, we ventured down the road to Tony Sacco's Coal Oven Kitchen.
Now, I was somewhat familiar with Tony Sacco's and knew that it was a franchise. About 10 years ago, I stayed at a hotel in the northwest Chicago suburb of Mount Prospect. The hotel was part of an entertainment/shopping destination called Randhurst Village that had a Tony Sacco's pizza joint in it. That Tony Sacco's location didn't last too long - maybe two or three years - and I never did try it.
The original Tony Sacco's dates back nearly 15 years ago when three Florida friends - all Michigan natives - decided to open a coal-fired pizza place, similar to old-world wood-fired Italian pizza places they had in their youths. Only one - Tony Sacco - had any restaurant experience, while the other two - Chuck Senatore and George Kurajian - were an engineer and a former food service equipment executive, respectively. They decided upon using Sacco's name since it sounded the most Italian of the bunch, but Sacco left the venture before they opened their first Tony Sacco's Coal Oven Pizza in Estero, FL in 2008. The group decided on coal over the old world wood ovens because coal burned hotter - and faster - than wood.
Now, opening a restaurant in the midst of a recession probably isn't the smartest thing to do, but Senatore and Kurajian stuck it out and Tony Sacco's started to get a following. They initially had plans to open 10 of the Tony Sacco's locations in the southwest Florida area on their own, but then the co-owners were approached by a handful of people looking to open franchised restaurants in the Midwest and southern states. Senatore and Kurajian soon started the TSP Management Group to oversee franchising the Tony Sacco restaurants. At one point, there were over a dozen Tony Sacco's in states from Illinois and Michigan down through Indiana and Ohio, and on south all the way to a handful in southwest Florida.
It turned out that the Tony Sacco's Coal Oven Pizza concept didn't work out well for a lot of franchisees as there are now just four other locations outside of the original one in Estero, FL. And the confounding things is that the remaining locations are located in peculiar areas - there's one in northwest Indiana, one in a small city outside of Cleveland, one in a small town between Detroit and Lansing, MI, and the newest one in Eldridge, a bedroom community/agriculture-centric area just north of the Quad Cities.
In 2017, the Whitty family - whose father, Joe, founded Happy Joe's Pizza - sold their interests in Happy Joe's to a newly formed company called Dynamic Restaurant Holdings. At the same time, Dynamic Restaurant Holdings acquired majority interest in Tony Sacco's Coal Oven Pizza. Ironically, Dynamic Restaurant Holdings named industry veteran Tom Sacco (formerly with Bonanza and Ponderosa Steakhouse, Red Robin and BJ's Brewhouse) as their new CEO in October of last year. Sacco - who has no family connection to the original Tony Sacco - announced last fall that they would put in a Tony Sacco's Coal Oven Pizza in what was the old Lancers, then Grille 350 location in Eldridge.
The Eldridge Tony's Sacco location is attached to the Happy Joe's restaurant, and because of that it has a different menu than the other locations. From Day 1, Tony Sacco's Coal Oven Pizza never had fryers, microwave ovens, or stove tops. Everything was made in the coal-fired ovens. But while the Eldridge location still has a coal-fired oven, the attached kitchen from Happy Joe's allows for an expansion of food offerings such as burgers, sandwiches, Italian entrees and appetizers such as Buffalo chicken dip and Italian nachos featuring crostini bread instead of corn chips.
Our friend had eaten there with other friends a few nights before, but she said, "The service was just so bad. I thought the food was good, but the service was horrible." It could be that the service is bad because Tony Sacco's is having trouble getting employees to work there. In a recent article in the Quad City Times, Tom Sacco lamented that he was struggling to find full-time employees - even paying more than the going rate of most other restaurants in the area. He said that many of the potential employees indicated that they didn't want to make the drive from the Quad Cities up to Eldridge - just 15 minutes north of downtown Davenport. Sacco said that he only had 12 employees at one point when he ideally would like to have 30 to 35 people on staff. Sacco said that he had to move a couple employees over to Eldridge from the Tony Sacco's operation just outside of South Bend, IN.
This past late fall, we lost one of our favorite pizza places in the Quad Cities, Crust Pizza. (Click here to see the entry on Crust.) We liked the variety Crust offered (Chicago-deep dish, wood-fired Neapolitan, and tavern-cut thin crust pizzas) and they had a great selection of craft beer, wine and a full bar menu. So, when we heard that a Tony Sacco's was opening in the area, we were hoping that it would, at the very least, fill some of the hole that the closing of Crust put into our regular rotation of non-Quad City-style pizza establishments that we like to go to.
We pulled into the parking lot at Tony Sacco's just after 6 p.m. on a Friday night. (see map) We think that getting employees was still a problem for Tony Sacco's because we were told it would be a 30 minute wait for a table. Even with social distancing guidelines in place, there appeared to be a number of open tables and booths in the restaurant. It was a very large space. We had eaten at the old Lancers Grille a couple of times years and years ago, but I didn't remember it being this big of a place. We just figured they didn't have enough wait staff to take care of people if they sat everyone as they came in.
After we put our name in, the hostess asked for a phone number to contact us when our table was ready. I looked over and saw a small bar area with a corrugated tin facade. I asked if we could get a drink while we waited. The hostess flatly said, "No, you cannot." We sort of stood by the front door and she finally said, "And you can't even be in here waiting for your table. You'll have to go to your car." I asked if we could stand in the vestibule and she said, "No, I'm sorry."
So we did. We sat in our car waiting for just over 30 minutes before my phone buzzed with a text that our table was ready. While we were sitting there talking, our friend kept peering over at the front door. "There's people standing in the entry way," she said with a disgusted tone. We told her that it was fine to wait in the car. I'd rather be hanging in an area away from people in the dead of winter in the middle of a worldwide pandemic.
We went back inside and were greeted by another young lady who took us to a booth just past the hostess stand. We were given menus and it wasn't too long after that when our server for the evening, an energetic and fun young lady by the name of Pam came over to greet us. The first dilemma we had was what to drink. They had a couple IPA's on tap - one of 12 beers they had on tap - one, the Space Dust from the Elysian Brewing Company in Seattle, Washington, and the other the Surf Zombie IPA from the Iowa Brewing Company in Cedar Rapids. I started out with a Space Dust, then switched to a Surf Zombie for my second beer.
Drinks for the women were tough. My wife wanted a vodka and cranberry, but all they had were cans of cranberry lemonade. She ended up taking a Space Dust IPA. Our friend loves lagers and she's a big fan of Samuel Adams beer. Well, they had no lagers on tap, no Sam Adams in bottles and the only full-bodied lager they had was Budweiser in bottles. She reluctantly took one of those. Pam apologized for them not having Samuel Adams. "We get requests for that beer all the time," she said. "I need to let the owner know that we may need to bring some in."
(I saw Tom Sacco sitting up at the bar later in the evening, recognizing him from his picture in the paper.)
We figured that we'd get a pizza - our friend was completely good with our standard Italian sausage, pepperoni and mushroom. At Tony Sacco's, they offer two kinds of pepperoni - the regular cut and the "cupped" pepperoni that curls up and is a little more crisp than the regular pepperoni. We ordered a large (16") pizza with the regular pepperoni.
My wife also wanted to get a salad and she was able to talk our friend into sharing the Italian chop salad they had on the menu. It featured chopped romaine lettuce mixed in with pepperoni, sliced ham and salami, red onions, chopped tomatoes, banana pepper rings, chopped celery with green and Kalamata olives. Shredded provolone cheese topped the salad.
We sat there for quite sometime waiting for the salad to show up. It finally came to the table and not more than 30 seconds later while the women were divvying up the salad, our pizza came. "Oh, geez," my wife said. "I would have liked to have gotten the salad long before the pizza."
Pam came over to check on us after the pizza made it to the table and I said, "I think they would have liked to have gotten the salad a lot sooner than just 30 seconds before the pizza showed up."
She immediately apologized. "That's on me, you guys," she said. "I should have asked if you wanted it before the pizza because we consider our salads as regular entrees." Quite honestly, it wasn't that big of a deal and it was another learning experience for us as patrons and Pam as a server at a new restaurant.
The pizza looked pretty good. It featured chunks of sausage, large discs of pepperoni, and a bunch of sliced fresh mushrooms. The only thing that I could see was that it seemed that they concentrated much of the toppings in the center of the pizza.
And I have to say that the pizza was very good. The crust was puffy, but not too thick. The mozzarella cheese was fresh and creamy. And the sausage and pepperoni were slight spicy. The earthiness of the fresh mushrooms rounded the overall flavor of the pizza into a very favorable taste.
The women concentrated more on their salad - which was served in a large bowl and put on two plates that they had brought out - than they did the pizza. I had three pieces before I threw in the towel. My wife and our friend both had one piece each. The remaining 3 pieces we put into a box and let our friend take them back to her house.
Since Tony Sacco's Coal Oven Pizza had been open less than 6 weeks when we went there for our first visit, we completely broke our rule of waiting 3 months after a restaurant opens to give it a try. While there were a couple hiccups along the way on this visit, we wrote them off to growing pains of a new restaurant trying to find itself on a short staff. Our friend said that the service on this visit was markedly better than the service she experienced on her first visit just a few days before. I was pleased with our pizza - the cheese and toppings were fresh and full of flavor. It's one of the better ones that I've had in the greater Quad Cities area. We're not averse to taking the drive out to Eldridge and I'm sure we'll find ourselves out at Tony Sacco's Coal Fire Oven every once in a while to enjoy a good non-Quad City-style pizza.
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