Tony LePore, head chef at Tuscan Table Ristorante, in the former Photon/American Legion building in Greenfield.
Tom Russo | Daily Reporter
GREENFIELD — Growing up in south Florida in an Italian family, Tony Lepore remembers there always being plenty of hand-made pasta laying out to air-dry in his grandmother’s kitchen on Sunday mornings before church.
“When we came back from church, my grandmother would finish up all the food. She’d take pork and let it simmer in the sauce until everything just fell off the bone,” said Lepore, his dark brown eyes twinkling at the delicious memory.
Over 40 years later, Lepore is bringing his family’s Sicilian style of cooking to Greenfield.
Over the past two weeks, he and his wife Tracey have held a soft opening for the Tuscan Table Ristorante in the former American Legion building on the northeast corner of Osage and Center streets.
The menu features hand-made dishes made from fresh ingredients, including Italian classics like spaghetti bolognese, pasta primavera and chicken marsala.
The building that houses the restaurant belongs to Lepore’s boss, Bill Huffman, who ran his business — Photon Automation — out of the space until moving to a much larger building in Greenfield.
Lepore has worked the past three years as a mechanical design engineer for Huffman, who invited him to use the vacant building to realize his dream of opening a restaurant.
“I’ve loved cooking from a very young age,” said Lepore, 54, who jumped at the chance to make his lifelong dream of opening a restaurant come true.
His culinary prowess was revealed at work as a matter of chance, when he offered to take over weekly cooking duties from Huffman, who had made a habit of cooking breakfast on Mondays and lunch on Fridays for his staff.
“Bill loves to cook, but as the company grew he got busy and couldn’t do it anymore, so I said I’d do it,” Lepore recalled.
He made chicken cacciatore stuffed shells on his first day, and Huffman was blown away by the dish.
“He told me, ‘If you want to do a supper club here, go for it,’” said Lepore, who quickly went to work fine-tuning the building’s kitchen to suit his needs.
One of his first items of business was buying a commercial mixer to help make the many varieties of hand-made pasta he enjoyed as a kid.
The accomplished chef loves nothing more than seeing a patron’s eyes light up as they taste one of his signature dishes.
“The thing I love the most is when I cook something that someone has hated all their life,” said Lepore, who recalls one recent guest who devoured a plate of his signature sausage and peppers, despite disliking onions and peppers all his life.
“He finished everything on his plate,” Lepore said with a grin.
With a raspy deep voice, olive skin and short curly black hair, he looks and sounds every bit a Sicilian chef.
On a recent weeknight, he demonstrated his pasta-making skills, methodically rolling out the dough to make cavatelli.
His mother, Lucille, was the one who taught him to cook, ever since he was a little boy whisking eggs in the kitchenette she ran in south Florida.
Lepore grew up in Coral Springs, Fla. just northwest of Ft. Lauderdale. It was there that he became passionate about his mother’s and grandmother’s Italian-inspired cooking.
His mother’s parents had immigrated to the United States from Italy, where his grandmother learned to cook in Sicily. She passed that love of cooking on to Lepore’s mother, who passed it on to him.
Lepore still loves to experiment with new dishes while preparing some of his favorites, including Fruitti di Mare, a traditional seafood pasta dish which translates to “fruit of the sea.”
“I like to familiarize traditional Italian dishes to the American palate,” said Lepore.
“For example, bolognese sauce doesn’t have tomato in it in Italy, but I add tomatoes to match it to the American palate. Authentic Italian lasagna calls for a béchamel sauce instead of ricotta cheese, but I (forgot the sauce and) use a lot of cheeses and let the cheese stand on its own,” he said.
Lepore talks passionately about food, and says he likely would have started his culinary career sooner had he not been pulled out of his mother’s kitchenette and put to work in his dad’s mechanic shop around the age of 7.
While he found he had a knack for mechanics working for his dad, his main love has always been in the kitchen.
At the age of 32, Lepore graduated from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale’s culinary program in 2003 and quickly landed a head chef’s job at an Italian restaurant in Florida.
“I was replacing a chef who was Spanish, and the recipes were all written in Spanish,” he said.
His boss couldn’t translate the recipes back into English, so Lepore cooked him every item on the menu from scratch.
“I made him every dish the way I know my mother and grandmother would make it, the way I like to make it,” he said.
His success at that restaurant soon eventually landed him a second head chef’s job at a different Italian spot, a gig that went great until the owner got into a bit of trouble “and the cops came and took him away,” Lepore recalled with a grin.
Lepore then went to work cooking for an acquaintance who owned several Mulligan’s Beach House franchises along the Florida coast. It was during his time there that he met his future wife, Tracey, in 2004.
The two married the following year and eventually moved to her home state of Iowa, where they embraced the quiet life in an old farmhouse on a two-acre spread.
One day, a fellow mechanical engineer told Lepore about a great little company called Photon in a relatively quiet Indiana town.
Lepore flew in for an interview and immediately clicked with Huffman.
“When I saw the kind of work environment Bill was developing, I decided to take the chance and make the move,” he recalled.
He and Tracey moved to Greenfield three years ago and have been living in an RV while searching for the perfect house. They finally found the one they were looking for — a historic farmhouse in Lewisville — which they are moving into this weekend.
Because of that, the Tuscan Table will be closed this weekend but will officially open next Sunday, Aug. 13.
Since all ingredients are purchased fresh in small quantities, diners must make an online reservation with their menu request in advance, rather than show up at the door.
“It’s a different way of doing things, but I hope people will like it,” said Lepore, who charges $45 for the complete meal, from appetizers and salad to dessert.
He and his wife work as a two-person team, preparing and serving the meals in the cozy dining space they converted from a former office area. She painted the dining room, he laid the floor and they worked together to build the decorative shelves from pallets.
“When Tracy and I do something together, it comes out outstanding,” said Lepore, seated in the dining room they worked together to create.
Their hope is the community will be hungry for the chance to enjoy some authentic Italian food, so that their restaurant venture can thrive. “I’m only 54,” Lepore said, “so I’ve still got plenty of gas left in the tank.”
To reserve a table for an upcoming Sunday, visit TuscanTableRistorante.com.
