Tony's celebrates five decades

"I don't feel like it's been 50 years," Tony Vallone murmured almost wonderingly as he sat at the back of his famous restaurant during lunch last Tuesday.

He was clad in elegant blue-and-white tattersall, with a burst of silk paisley leaping out against his dark Italian suit. At 71, he is craggier now than he was in his well-fed phase, lean from a stomach-stapling he underwent several years ago, and from a 2003 bout of West Nile disease that almost killed him. Yet his gaze was as vigilant as ever, darting across the plush, skylit kingdom that has borne his name through various incarnations for five decades now - an eternity in a young, forgetful city like Houston.

The next day, April 1, would be designated Tony Vallone Day by Mayor Annise Parker. There would be an official proclamation to fetch back to Tony's from City Hall, but otherwise the anniversary festivities at the restaurant would be low-key. Vallone is waiting until Nov. 19 to stage a big charity dinner commemorating Tony's half-century, when he'll close down the restaurant for a night to benefit Life Flight.

For that evening, he's thinking about resurrecting some of the restaurant's favorites from the early days, when a 22-year-old Tony launched a simple Italian spot on Sage Road in 1965. "But a little more modern and snazzy," he qualifies. "In the old days it was braciole, just Italian food."

Well, not just any Italian food. "Nobody else was doing seafood and pasta in Houston back then, although it was common on the East Coast," recalls Vallone. "Italian food had not progressed at all here." To purchase the calamari he wanted to stuff, bake and turn into salad, he had to resort to a bait shop.

Tony's was different, and the right people took notice. One of them was Gerald Hines, Vallone's landlord on Sage, who opened Houston's Galleria in 1970, on the way to becoming one of the world's most important retail developers. Hines was opening a retail center on Post Oak, he told the young restaurateur, and he would like Tony's as a tenant. Vallone demurred. "I don't have enough money," he told Hines.

"I'll make sure you get a loan," Hines told him. And he did. He also flew Vallone with him to Chicago - "my first trip there," remembers Vallone - to visit designers at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. It was heady stuff. Vallone credits Hines as being the chief motivator who nudged him toward the "finer dining" that eventually put Tony's on the map.

Another of Vallone's important early patrons was Maxine Mesinger, the Houston Chronicle society columnist. Vallone remembers that one night in the mid-'60s when the gravel-voiced Mesinger beckoned him over to her table and rasped, "I want you to know you're in (expletive deleted) trouble."

Vallone was taken aback. Women didn't talk that way in public much in mid-60s Houston, he recalled, and he worried his food or service might have fallen short. Not so: "I like this (expletive deleted) joint, and you're going to see a lot of me," she informed him.

Indeed he did. Mesinger wrote about Tony's in the next day's column, and countless times thereafter, name-checking the "boldfaced names," as they were then archly known, who showed up to dine there. Her mentions made Tony's a place to be, but Vallone didn't always feel ready.

One day, he got a call from a gentleman wanting to arrange a private party for 80 people. Vallone didn't think he could swing the credit with suppliers necessary for the gig, and even if he could, what if they canceled at the last minute? It was hard going, and he was barely keeping his doors open.

Then came the call from Mesinger, who had steered the party - and host Izzy Proler, one of Houston's innovative scrap metal tycoons - Tony's way. "Book the party," growled Mesinger. "He'll show up."

And lo, they all did sooner or later, even unto Fort Worth's Bass brothers, who flew two planeloads of people to Houston for an art exhibition and asked Vallone to close down the restaurant for them. He said no. Then came the call from another fan, John Connally. "Take the party, do not lose it," Connally advised. It was such a success that the Bass brothers ended up trying to lure Vallone to Fort Worth.

Tony's cachet only multiplied when Vallone moved to his posher Post Oak digs on Aug. 17, 1972. Houston was booming, and the city was increasingly laying a claim as a place to be reckoned with. Tony's was the stage of choice for strutting the city's wealth, status and power.

Society women dressed to the nines for a night at Tony's. Hostesses brought their prize guests to the restaurant to show them a good time (and, not coincidentally, to show them off). Lynn Wyatt gave a party for Princess Margaret in Tony's wine cellar, and Vallone remembers John Connally teaching the princess to Texas two-step to the accompaniment of live violins.

"Maxine brought in the stars," remembers Vallone, and she could often be seen holding court at a prime table in the middle aisle. (The seating chart that put her there was as complex - and as highly fraught -as any at the court of Versailles.)

The food evolved with the increasingly high-toned clientele. "Everything was French then," notes Vallone, and his restaurant's food slowly moved away from its Italian roots, until the china service plates bore the inscription "The Poetry of French Food."

Vallone had worked with Edmund Foulard, the French-born chef whose Foulard's was an early Houston bastion of fine French dining, and had absorbed Foulard's tutelage that sauces and soups were the backbone of any proper kitchen. Through all the executive chefs that Vallone employed over the years - from Mark Cox to Olivier Ciesielski to Grant Gordon to his current chef, Kate McLean - the quality of the restaurant's sauces has been as much a beacon as its luxurious ingredients sourced from around the world.

Part of Vallone's genius was to make Houstonians feel that the world was at their feet at a time when the city was increasingly staking its claim on a national and international stage. Nothing was too much trouble, from the freshest Dover sole to hulking knobs of white truffle, or the glistening Beluga caviar that Baron Ricky di Portanova would, by special request, theatrically toss into a plate of pasta for his table mates.

Di Portanova, a Cullen oil heir who Vallone remembers as "living in a Roman trailer" before he staked and won his legal claim on the family fortune, was one of the clients with whom the young restaurateur hobnobbed in his off hours. Vallone recalls Sandra di Portanova as the kind of spectacular hostess who, at the couple's Acapulco villa, would match her party tablecloths to her gown. Again, it was heady stuff for what Vallone himself describes as "a kid from the wrong side of the tracks."

Another facet of Vallone's genius was to make his restaurant fun. Sure, he required male guests to wear tie and jacket, and there was a rack of spares at the front desk for emergencies. But Vallone would cater to favored guests in all sorts of charmingly goofy ways. If they wanted French toast for a late supper, they got it. When developer Harold Farb requested chicken-fried steak, no problem. Did oilman John Mecom crave chili? Vallone made it for him, and the proletarian dish eventually achieved cult status on Fridays. (It is still served at Vallone's, the restaurateur's modern steakhouse at Memorial Gateway.)

The message, says Vallone, was that Tony's was "not snobby, not formal. We're fine dining, but we're friendly." It was an apt note to strike in a city that - unlike its more strait-laced rival to the north, Dallas - has never taken itself too seriously.

Indeed, some of the gossip that tumbled out of Tony's in the 1970s and '80s was positively frisky. Counting back from the Obama years, Vallone may have served every president except Ronald Reagan - to say nothing of the time Italian president Francesco Cossigo brought all of the G7 heads of state in to dine - but he also accommodated the whims of such regulars as oilman J. Howard Marshall, the elderly oilman with a taste for buxom blondes. Marshall once had Tony's valets bring out two shiny new Bentleys to surprise Lady Walker, his mistress in the pre-Anna-Nicole Smith era.

When Walker, standing in front of the restaurant, couldn't decide between the sedan and convertible, Marshall told her, "Take both."

Houston has changed a great deal since the days of such outsized figures. Power and social standing have decentralized, and the city is far more diverse. The heyday of powerful gossip columnists has passed. (Vallone was at Maxine Mesinger's bedside when she died in Methodist Hospital in 2001.)

These days, the great and the good still congregate at the 11-year-old Tony's that Vallone built on Richmond Avenue at Timmons Lane, along with those who aspire to be considered great and good. But it's an older, more sedate crowd than in previous decades, without such a fever of exuberant status display. As the restaurant scene here has broadened, there are other stages on which the social dance is performed.

Like the city he sprang from, Vallone himself has evolved with the times, reinventing himself and his restaurant when necessary. He has long since relaxed the tie and jacket rule, although a prim sign posted at the entrance reads "proper attire required" - a hedge against the shorts and tennis-shoe crowd. Vallone built a restaurant mini-empire with more casual concepts like Anthony's, La Griglia and Grotto, then sold the latter two to Tilman Fertitta's Landry's group in 2003, closing Anthony's and consolidating his efforts at Tony's again. There have been reversals along the way - most notably an ill-fated Mexican restaurant on Shepherd Drive - but Vallone always bounced back, even from West Nile.

Interestingly, Tony's food has been better than ever in recent years, growing sleekly modern and yet soulful under the late chef Gordon and the current chef, McLean. He embraced the restaurant's Italian roots more fully at the latest location, a happy change. ("They never really went away," he qualifies.)

He's still bringing in ingredients no one else has, like the city's first taste of puntarelle, the beguilingly bitter Italian green. He'll still talk your ear off about the various types of bottarga, or the precise number of seconds needed to extract the perfect Neapolitan-style espresso ristretto, of which he consumes multiple cups instead of lunch these days.

"Whatever years I have left will be about food, only food," Vallone said. "I'm more passionate about it than ever, and I'm in the kitchen every day."

Yet he still has his ringmaster gene, leaping up to glad-hand a judge and to greet philanthropist Joan Schnitzer Levy, a patron since the 1960s, who had come to pick a menu for a charity gala.

And he still has a keen, slightly mischievous eye for the lower-key social pageant that plays out in his restaurant every day, noting that both the new wife and the daughter-in-law of a local billionaire were in attendance that day, one in the bar and one in the dining room, and that they did not exchange greetings.

Then he was on to enthuse about the new art he had just installed to hang with the glimmering Rauschenberg and the towering Jesus Moroles sculpture that dominate his dining room. A circular abstract by Houston artist Joe Mancuso, a dramatic new floor-to-ceiling section screen by John Palmer, another Houston painter - they are far cries from the less sophisticated jumble of paintings that once graced the Post Oak Tony's, with its outré smoked mirrors.

"I like to keep it fresh," said Vallone as he looked around his realm and found it good. And then he added something that generations of Houstonians have understood: "You come to Tony's to escape life."