At home at ‘the Riv’ with boss Tony, discussing pasta and Lidia Bastianich

From the way Tony and Jesse Pagliuso at Lakes Coffee talk about Antonio “Tony” Sparacio, the warm-hearted face of Riviera Restaurant in Medford Lakes, I feel like I already know him. As soon as I walk into the shop, popular for its sandwiches and pizza, I see Tony kneading dough on the prep table. It’s 10 a.m. on a Tuesday.

“Who taught you make that?” I ask, by way of greeting.

“My brother, Peter,” he says with a fondness I can relate to. I also have a brother I love very much. I find out later that his brother’s formal name is Pietro.

“How many years apart are you?”

“Sixteen and a half,” he responds.

Antonio “Tony” Sparacio sprinkles mozzarella on a pizza. | PHOTOS BY NIKKI PALLADINO

Tony and his brother’s family run the pizza shops their parents started in the late 1970s, serving homemade soup and sauces, sandwiches on bread from bakeries based in New Jersey, and homemade pastas, including mafaldine or reginette (Italian for little queens).

It’s a flat, wide, ribbon-shaped pasta produced from two parts water and two parts durum semolina, with the help of an Emiliomiti – a professional pasta machine and dedicated cook, Carlos, who’s worked at “The Riv” for 18 years. The more people I meet, the longer it seems their tenure is.

Deb, the manager, has Carlos beat by two years. “Tony’s a great boss to work with,” she tells me, sharing how he joins the staff for family meal, and treats everyone who works at the Riv like they’re his family.

The minute Tony moves from behind the pizza counter, he points to the photo of his parents that’s conspicuously hanging in the restaurant’s dining room. “We owe everything to our parents,” he says, of Salvatore and Angela Sparacio, who were born, like Tony and his older brother, Peter, in Carini, Sicily.

Salvatore and Angela Sparacio.

Their original home is still in the family, and the family travels between Medford Lakes and Sicily regularly. Even though I didn’t have the opportunity to meet them, I can tell the Sparacio Family influence is everywhere, from the bone-in chicken that’s in the freshly made chicken soup, to the veal ossobuco that is often a special.

I’m in the kitchen, observing Carlos’s impressive pasta-making technique, when Tony introduces me to Claudia Horner, a longtime customer, who’s stopped in for lunch.

“My girls are in their 40s now but when they were teenagers, Tony would pull up stools for them and let them watch him throw pizza in the air. Tony has an energy to him you can feel. It must be in his DNA,” she said. “I feel like I’m eating in Manhattan when I come here, and everyone who knows about the restaurant, knows not to dare come in on the weekends without a reservation.”

Tony’s humble, which is how he describes chef Lidia Matticchio Bastianich. He and his wife were lucky enough to meet the chef by chance, one night, as walk-ins, at her former restaurant, Felidia, in Midtown East.

“My wife and I dropped our daughters off at a concert and decided to go to dinner. We walked in and she was at the hostess stand. She’s incredibly humble. I introduced myself and she talked to my wife and I in Italian and then sent us appetizers – octopus and salmon.”

I’ve only been at the Riv for an hour and a half, but already Tony’s served me espresso, offered to let me take home some of the seeded rolls I keep raving about, asked Carlos to prepare me a fresh dish of my favorite pasta – bucatini, and invited me to come to his house to meet more of his family. The 57-year-old is all about connecting – with his customers and the community at-large, telling me how the Riv, Murphy’s, and Ott’s, all businesses in town, help each other.

“We’re like Cheers. I’ve seen people pour glasses of wine and deliver them across the room to people they recognize at other tables,” he said.

In 1981, the brothers broke through the wall into what was then a butcher shop, and began serving Italian-American dishes like spaghetti and meatballs before eventually expanding the menu to include chicken or veal piccata and pasta with vodka sauce, a dish Tony insists is better if the onions are caramelized. That’s how we got on the topic of last night’s dinner, a pork chop I made, using one of Bastianich’s recipes, which called for caramelized onions. Tony and his team are only working with the best ingredients all the time, including durum semolina for the pasta and non-bleached, non-bromated flour for the pizza dough.

While I get the feeling Tony and I could sit and talk all day about food and family, he has a restaurant to run and I have a writing deadline and Amatriciana to try, while it’s hot. So, I hug Carlos and Deb goodbye and Giacomo, Tony’s cousin, who, stops in on his lunch break. The thick spaghetti and delicious sauce with guanciale are not to be missed.

Reservations are recommended at the restaurant. Friends and neighbors are especially welcome.

Riviera Restaurant: 6 Stokes Road, Medford Lakes, N.J.